The authors cover their principles of decentralization in Chapter 2.
Ideas like an open system does not have central intelligence and use examples of the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 and Hurricane Katrina.
And how open systems can mutate. And Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems can survive destruction and attempts to control them.
“Since the Industrial Revolution, people had communicated by mail, telegraph, or telephone, but the Internet changed everything in less than a decade” and no one person is in charge of the Internet. There is no headquarters to be bombed, no leader to assassinate, and you cannot kill the Internet. “What if you destroyed half the Web sites on the Internet? It would still survive. What if you took away 95 percent? Again, the system would persevere – in fact, it was designed to withstand a nuclear attack.”
Chapter 3 covers how AT&T was broken up in 1984 to smaller utilities which were just mini-versions of the telephone giant. But then came the Internet and Skype for basically “free” phone calls all over the globe…..devastating for the old pioneering giants.
Then Craigslist which devastated newspaper classified advertising revenue by creating a P2P sense of “community.” The authors write, “Virtually everyone we’ve talked to who has used craigslist refers to the site as a community, a place from another era when neighbors would help each other out.”
Think of this new Web-based P2P “community” as being one dedicated to destroying something….like the U.S. or Israel or big oil or socialism etc. In the discussion of Craigslist, the authors write: “We realized that all along we’d been talking about how open systems are about the users, not about the leadership. In an open system what matters most isn’t the CEO but whether the leadership is trusting enough of members to leave them alone.”
Sooooo, Where’s bin Laden? Make any difference if a B-1 has sealed him in a cave or if he is dead of natural causes?
Brafman and Beckstrom seem to be indicating that a hands-off approach to providing the network (or a foundation like al-Qaeda) does better when the leadership launches the P2P idea platform and steps back. The U.S. Air Force “Aimpoint” report mentioned earlier seems to indicate al-Qaeda is truly a sort of Ford Foundation funding some projects and networking like-minded groups and individuals. A sort of Craigslist concept for terrorists. A P2P system without the spider head the U.S. seems to be chasing.
Add to this the Sun Tzu idea of “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake” and one can see how airpower is creating more enemies, and how in Pakistan millions of people are being displaced but the government cannot allow U.S. aircraft or people distribute humanitarian aid……….because these millions who have fled the battle areas blame the U.S. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/03/world/asia/03helmand.html?th&emc=th
In the chapter discussion about browser wars, the authors write: “On the periphery were countless other individuals who would contribute patches. No one was really in charge, but the best ideas were the ones that got used. It was just like the Nant’an: you follow someone – in this case, use their patch – because you respect their skills and you like the results you get, not because the boss told you to.”
The next example is about Wikipedia as an open system. Started out as a simple idea of a “Nupedia” for children with peer review. “Derived from the Hawaiian word for ‘quick’ wiki is a technology that allows Web site users to easily (and quickly) edit the content of the site themselves.” And again the idea; “put people into an open system and they’ll automatically want to contribute.”
An interesting aspect of this was the Taliban capture of New York Times reporter David Rohde who escaped on 19 June 2009. The NYTimes and Wikipedia cooperated to keep his capture off the Internet because they believed the Taliban would be checking him out online.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/29/technology/internet/29wiki.html?th&emc=th
Chapter 5 opens with an example of the Quaker circle of Friends functioning in a starfish manner to tackle slavery. Again there are examples of the Apaches of the Southwestern U.S. deciding that “once brought into a circle, members were accepted as Apache – whether by birth, adoption or capture. That’s the thing about circles: once you join, you’re an equal” and “…most of us, whether we realize it or not, are members of a decentralized circle of one kind or another.” There is also a caution: “When circles take on more than 14 or so members, the bond breaks down.”
(As an aside to all this, let me interject something I learned when lecturing about Blasket Island literature. A barter community needs at least 150 people to survive, if the population falls to less than 100, it is failing. If fewer than 60, the community is doomed. This magic number of 150 is the average African village, and also the average telephone listings of a family, the holiday card list, and the Internet contacts in your e-mail program. So some scholars argue that as individuals we are still the barter village of 150 just spread across continents.)
Brafman and Beckstrom say since circles do not have a hierarchy, they develop rules and norms to remain in the circle. “As a result of this self-enforcement, norms can be even more powerful than rules. Rules are someone else’s idea of what you should do. (like the Pentagon) If you break a rule, just don’t get caught and you’ll be okay. But with norms, it’s about what you as a member have signed up for, and what you’ve created…..Members assume the best of each other, and generally that’s what they get in return.”
There is a mention of a catalyst – something that speeds up the inevitable action or as they write about chemistry: “…any element or compound that initiates a reaction without fusing into that reaction.” But as a person, a catalyst “isn’t usually in it for praise and accolades. When his or her job is done, a catalyst knows it’s time to move on.” A good point when thinking about Osama bin Laden and the thousands of troops searching for him……He never said he wanted to move into the White House or Buckingham Palace or even Motel 6 in Sunderland. Bin Laden was a catalyst, using the al-Qaeda system of the Americans to develop an international community of like-minded people willing to make sacrifices and take action for moral reasons.
“Leaders in top-down organizations want to control what’s happening, thereby limiting creativity….and most important(ly), centralized organizations aren’t set up to launch decentralized movements.” In the Sharp/slavery/Quaker example, “decentralized organizations were a rarity and entrance into them was difficult, but today the Internet serves as an open platform on the back of which a wide variety of starfish organizations can be launched. The Internet is a breeding ground and launching pad for new starfish organizations. Skype, eMule and Craigslist are among the many decentralized organizations that have been launched atop the Internet.”
Elizabeth Cady Stanton is mentioned. While attending an anti-slavery convention, she was forced to sit in a segregated and screened-off area for women.
A few years later, she had the courage to suggest that women be allowed to vote. “In the months and years that followed, every respected newspaper in the nation (U.S.A.) blasted Stanton. ‘All the journalists,’ she wrote, ‘from Maine to Texas, seemed to strive with each other to see which could make our movement the most ridiculous.’” That last line reminds me of the Massachusetts congressman who wrote to his constituents condemning the “cowardly” attack on 9/11.
The authors have Stanton as the catalyst and Susan B. Anthony as the champion. And government made her a champion. When she showed up in Rochester, N.Y. and demanded a ballot, she voted and was arrested for the act…..this placed Anthony on the media stage. She drew massive crowds – mostly of women – and was later tried and convicted of a crime and fined $100 – which she said she never paid.
03 July 2009
29 June 2009
The Starfish and the Spider
The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations
By Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom
Unlike John Robb and others who have taken basic military lessons and turned them into other strategies and tactics, this book reminds me more of the mid-Seventies when so many people in business became devoted to the military teachings of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.
Brafman and Beckstrom are entrepreneurs who see modern business changes from the perspective of military and government actions.
To me, the price of the book is justified in the first chapter as they move from the Peer-to-Peer problems of MGM and introduce anthropologist Tom Nevins.
In a very readable fashion, they take us back to 1519 when Cortes arrived in Tenochititlan (Mexico City) and got greedy. After his small force cut the head off the Spider organization of the Aztecs, they turned north and headed into what has since become the Southwest of the United States.
If you are reading this as World War II and Afghanistan, good!
The Spanish-Aztec conflict was much more like nation-state warfare. Leaders on both sides (Cortes and Montezuma) and people following orders. Cut off the head of the spider and there is chaos until a new leader can be found and an organization rebuilt. Take down the big leader and the capital city and the rest of society and the economic system falls apart.
Cortes had a small force, but a professionally trained and well armed, and armored, military unit. Horses, metal weapons, fighting spirit, maneuver tactics, chains of command, military specialization – for the sake of argument, something like the U.S. military of today…not a ragtag bunch of gunslingers, or pirates, or drug runners, but soldiers following orders. People who could take down the Incas and Aztecs.
For the first century and a half, the Spanish Conquistadors seemed unstoppable in Central and South America against societies hundreds or thousands of years old. Then in the 1680s, the Spanish headed north – there was not much up there, but the Spanish had to head north to see what other riches might be conquered.
And Spanish lost to a primitive people (who really had no riches, no real natural resources other than too much solar energy) who had not even bothered to build towns.
The Spanish tried to convert these Apaches to Catholicism and for the most part failed. Then the Apaches – who had little to protect other than their culture and society – started to wrest control of New Mexico from the Spanish.
For the next two hundred years, the Spanish fought a losing battle against these people who – in Spanish eyes – had nothing worth fighting for.
So Brafman and Beckstrom see lessons in looking at the leadership models of the two opponents. The Spanish are – like the U.S./UK and many nation-states – Spiders and the Apaches – like the insurgents in Iraq, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and other insurgent organizations – are Starfish.
Now, if Brafman and Beckstrom are correct in saying “the unstoppable power of leaderless organizations” then there is cause to worry. A lot of worry.
First of all, this fits into the idea that guerrillas win by not losing (Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and the various insurgent groups in Iraq today) and the idea that the strong become weaker when they fight the weak, and that strong nations (or organizations) lose their legitimacy when the people see their government leadership as failing (Iran today and the U.S. during the Bush Administration).
They say the Apaches preserved because they were decentralized and leaderless. “A centralized organization is easy to understand….You have a clear leader in charge.”
They paraphrase Nevin that this is a coercive organization because up-and-coming leaders can be fired for not following the system (think of the Pentagon). Rules need to be followed or the system collapses (think of Hurricane Katrina).
“The Apaches continued to hold off the Spanish for another two centuries. It wasn’t that the Apaches had some secret weapon that was unknown to the Incas and the Aztecs. Nor had the Spanish army lost its might. No, the Apache defeat of the Spanish was all about the way the Apaches were organized as a society. The Spanish couldn’t defeat them for the same reason that the record labels weren’t able to squash the P2P trend.”
(And, of course, the P2P trend is also manifested in Twitter and all the other social networking areas of the Internet….people sharing online.)
They quote Nevins on differences between the Apaches and other tribes. “If you look, for example, at the Sioux – the Dances with Wolves people – they had some degree of political centralization. They resisted spectacularly for short periods of time, but they were really not successful for more than ten years.”
So 200 years for the Apache and only 10 years for the Sioux.
“In a decentralized organization, there’s no clear leader, no hierarchy, and no headquarters.”
In the West, people like to think of other organizations being like those we are used to seeing. Leaders, like Presidents Barak Obama or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad….and we try consciously or subconsciously to plug others in to this concept, like Osama bin Laden.
The international news media is filled with reports about the U.S. or coalition forces claims of killing the No.2 or No. 3 insurgent leader in Iraq, or Yemen, or Somalia, or Afghanistan, or Pakistan, etc. What Brafman and Beckstrom might call “Spider Mentality” when people think in the terms of a coercive organization.
Take a serious look at (and give serious thought to) the concept of the Nant’an – the spiritual and cultural leader. (Which strikes me like as the role of the druid in ancient Celtic society.)
Tribe members followed the Nant’an because they wanted to, not because they were in a coercive system. (Also think of the German advertising for a penis for dinner)
The authors mention one Nant’an known to nearly all of us.
“One of the most famous Nant’ans in history was Geronimo, who defended his people against the American forces for decades. Geronimo never commanded an army. Rather, he himself started fighting, and everyone around him joined in. The idea was, ‘If Geronimo is taking arms, maybe it’s a good idea. Geronimo’s been right in the past, so it makes sense to fight alongside him.’ You wanted to follow Geronimo? You followed him. You didn’t want to follow him? Then you didn’t. The power lay with each individual – you were free to do what you wanted. The phrase ‘you should’ doesn’t even exist in the Apache language. Coercion is a foreign concept.”
Remind you of the Internet?
Or John Robb writing about how global guerrillas can “swarm” targets?
“On first impression, it may sound like the Apaches were loosey-goosey and disorganized. In reality, they were an advanced and sophisticated society –it’s just a decentralized organization is a completely different creature….the traits of a decentralized society – flexibility, shared power, ambiguity – made the Apaches immune to attacks that would have destroyed a centralized society.”
The authors write: “Let’s see what happens when a coercive system takes on an open system. The Spanish (a centralized body) had been used to seeing everything through the lens of a centralized, or coercive, system. When they encountered the apaches, they went with the tactics that had worked in the past (the take-the-gold-and kill-the-leader strategy) and started eliminating Nant’ans. But as soon as they killed one off, a new Nant’an would emerge. The strategy failed because no one person was essential to the overall well-being of Apache society. Not only did the Apaches survive the Spanish attacks, but amazingly (their word, I do not find this amazing at all) the attacks served to make them even stronger.”
Throughout the Spider and the Starfish, the authors show example after example of the differences between well-organized groups and volunteer leaderless groups gaining in power and often running inside their O-O-D-A Loops.
Set aside the business models and as you are reading, from time to time plug in Osama bin Laden or Afghanistan or the UN or Somali pirates, or Hezbollah, or the Supreme Leader, or King George and George Washington, or the Internet etc.
No surprise that the U.S./UK forces (and most of the news media) are set up to fight the last war, think in centralized terms like a coercive organization and are now facing the decentralized Internet and leaderless (or replaceable leaders in) resistance groups in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan (to name just a few trouble spots).
If one person on the web can get some man to donate his penis for dinner, the Internet must be a rather good decentralized place to find volunteers for leaderless organizations of like-minded people.
And all the talk about finding and killing bin Laden (as if this might be a show-stopper) and all the press releases about the No. 2 leader being struck by a drone only really fits into the Western idea that someone is really in control of these insurgent forces.
If you go along with this spin, then let’s return to U.S. airpower in Afghanistan and the civilian casualties which create more enemies, and the destruction of infrastructure in Iraq and the firing of the Iraqi Army etc., and one wonders how highly centralized organizations are going to survive in the near future when the “Twitter Revolution” in Iran becomes commonplace.
Read on in the Spider and the Starfish about the President of the Internet.
By Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom
Unlike John Robb and others who have taken basic military lessons and turned them into other strategies and tactics, this book reminds me more of the mid-Seventies when so many people in business became devoted to the military teachings of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.
Brafman and Beckstrom are entrepreneurs who see modern business changes from the perspective of military and government actions.
To me, the price of the book is justified in the first chapter as they move from the Peer-to-Peer problems of MGM and introduce anthropologist Tom Nevins.
In a very readable fashion, they take us back to 1519 when Cortes arrived in Tenochititlan (Mexico City) and got greedy. After his small force cut the head off the Spider organization of the Aztecs, they turned north and headed into what has since become the Southwest of the United States.
If you are reading this as World War II and Afghanistan, good!
The Spanish-Aztec conflict was much more like nation-state warfare. Leaders on both sides (Cortes and Montezuma) and people following orders. Cut off the head of the spider and there is chaos until a new leader can be found and an organization rebuilt. Take down the big leader and the capital city and the rest of society and the economic system falls apart.
Cortes had a small force, but a professionally trained and well armed, and armored, military unit. Horses, metal weapons, fighting spirit, maneuver tactics, chains of command, military specialization – for the sake of argument, something like the U.S. military of today…not a ragtag bunch of gunslingers, or pirates, or drug runners, but soldiers following orders. People who could take down the Incas and Aztecs.
For the first century and a half, the Spanish Conquistadors seemed unstoppable in Central and South America against societies hundreds or thousands of years old. Then in the 1680s, the Spanish headed north – there was not much up there, but the Spanish had to head north to see what other riches might be conquered.
And Spanish lost to a primitive people (who really had no riches, no real natural resources other than too much solar energy) who had not even bothered to build towns.
The Spanish tried to convert these Apaches to Catholicism and for the most part failed. Then the Apaches – who had little to protect other than their culture and society – started to wrest control of New Mexico from the Spanish.
For the next two hundred years, the Spanish fought a losing battle against these people who – in Spanish eyes – had nothing worth fighting for.
So Brafman and Beckstrom see lessons in looking at the leadership models of the two opponents. The Spanish are – like the U.S./UK and many nation-states – Spiders and the Apaches – like the insurgents in Iraq, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and other insurgent organizations – are Starfish.
Now, if Brafman and Beckstrom are correct in saying “the unstoppable power of leaderless organizations” then there is cause to worry. A lot of worry.
First of all, this fits into the idea that guerrillas win by not losing (Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and the various insurgent groups in Iraq today) and the idea that the strong become weaker when they fight the weak, and that strong nations (or organizations) lose their legitimacy when the people see their government leadership as failing (Iran today and the U.S. during the Bush Administration).
They say the Apaches preserved because they were decentralized and leaderless. “A centralized organization is easy to understand….You have a clear leader in charge.”
They paraphrase Nevin that this is a coercive organization because up-and-coming leaders can be fired for not following the system (think of the Pentagon). Rules need to be followed or the system collapses (think of Hurricane Katrina).
“The Apaches continued to hold off the Spanish for another two centuries. It wasn’t that the Apaches had some secret weapon that was unknown to the Incas and the Aztecs. Nor had the Spanish army lost its might. No, the Apache defeat of the Spanish was all about the way the Apaches were organized as a society. The Spanish couldn’t defeat them for the same reason that the record labels weren’t able to squash the P2P trend.”
(And, of course, the P2P trend is also manifested in Twitter and all the other social networking areas of the Internet….people sharing online.)
They quote Nevins on differences between the Apaches and other tribes. “If you look, for example, at the Sioux – the Dances with Wolves people – they had some degree of political centralization. They resisted spectacularly for short periods of time, but they were really not successful for more than ten years.”
So 200 years for the Apache and only 10 years for the Sioux.
“In a decentralized organization, there’s no clear leader, no hierarchy, and no headquarters.”
In the West, people like to think of other organizations being like those we are used to seeing. Leaders, like Presidents Barak Obama or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad….and we try consciously or subconsciously to plug others in to this concept, like Osama bin Laden.
The international news media is filled with reports about the U.S. or coalition forces claims of killing the No.2 or No. 3 insurgent leader in Iraq, or Yemen, or Somalia, or Afghanistan, or Pakistan, etc. What Brafman and Beckstrom might call “Spider Mentality” when people think in the terms of a coercive organization.
Take a serious look at (and give serious thought to) the concept of the Nant’an – the spiritual and cultural leader. (Which strikes me like as the role of the druid in ancient Celtic society.)
Tribe members followed the Nant’an because they wanted to, not because they were in a coercive system. (Also think of the German advertising for a penis for dinner)
The authors mention one Nant’an known to nearly all of us.
“One of the most famous Nant’ans in history was Geronimo, who defended his people against the American forces for decades. Geronimo never commanded an army. Rather, he himself started fighting, and everyone around him joined in. The idea was, ‘If Geronimo is taking arms, maybe it’s a good idea. Geronimo’s been right in the past, so it makes sense to fight alongside him.’ You wanted to follow Geronimo? You followed him. You didn’t want to follow him? Then you didn’t. The power lay with each individual – you were free to do what you wanted. The phrase ‘you should’ doesn’t even exist in the Apache language. Coercion is a foreign concept.”
Remind you of the Internet?
Or John Robb writing about how global guerrillas can “swarm” targets?
“On first impression, it may sound like the Apaches were loosey-goosey and disorganized. In reality, they were an advanced and sophisticated society –it’s just a decentralized organization is a completely different creature….the traits of a decentralized society – flexibility, shared power, ambiguity – made the Apaches immune to attacks that would have destroyed a centralized society.”
The authors write: “Let’s see what happens when a coercive system takes on an open system. The Spanish (a centralized body) had been used to seeing everything through the lens of a centralized, or coercive, system. When they encountered the apaches, they went with the tactics that had worked in the past (the take-the-gold-and kill-the-leader strategy) and started eliminating Nant’ans. But as soon as they killed one off, a new Nant’an would emerge. The strategy failed because no one person was essential to the overall well-being of Apache society. Not only did the Apaches survive the Spanish attacks, but amazingly (their word, I do not find this amazing at all) the attacks served to make them even stronger.”
Throughout the Spider and the Starfish, the authors show example after example of the differences between well-organized groups and volunteer leaderless groups gaining in power and often running inside their O-O-D-A Loops.
Set aside the business models and as you are reading, from time to time plug in Osama bin Laden or Afghanistan or the UN or Somali pirates, or Hezbollah, or the Supreme Leader, or King George and George Washington, or the Internet etc.
No surprise that the U.S./UK forces (and most of the news media) are set up to fight the last war, think in centralized terms like a coercive organization and are now facing the decentralized Internet and leaderless (or replaceable leaders in) resistance groups in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan (to name just a few trouble spots).
If one person on the web can get some man to donate his penis for dinner, the Internet must be a rather good decentralized place to find volunteers for leaderless organizations of like-minded people.
And all the talk about finding and killing bin Laden (as if this might be a show-stopper) and all the press releases about the No. 2 leader being struck by a drone only really fits into the Western idea that someone is really in control of these insurgent forces.
If you go along with this spin, then let’s return to U.S. airpower in Afghanistan and the civilian casualties which create more enemies, and the destruction of infrastructure in Iraq and the firing of the Iraqi Army etc., and one wonders how highly centralized organizations are going to survive in the near future when the “Twitter Revolution” in Iran becomes commonplace.
Read on in the Spider and the Starfish about the President of the Internet.
Brave New War
I first learned of John Robb when an IT friend in Washington told me at the end of 2007 that I reminded him of a former Air Force officer who was blogging about fourth-generation warfare.
I soon became a fan of Robb's Brave New War blog and his book of the same title.
Robb brings up great points, and today is really blogging about self-reliant communities instead of seeking overall government control of nations.
He points out on Page vii the 2004 Osama bin Laden message countering President Bush's spin claim that Al Qaeda was against freedom and democracy. "Why did we not attack Sweden?" asked bin Laden.
Robb's critique of open societies -- very much in line with the opinions of Carl Prine -- reminded me of my own involvement during the Gulf War with the FBI's New England Anti-terrorist Task Force.
I was in USAF intelligence then (around October 1990) and assigned as intel laison to the task force (posse commitatus and all that stuff) along with Capt. Daniel Jamroz of the Mass. State Police and other cops and spooks. We worked for FBI Special Agent Leonard Cross (today a private security consultant).
Danny and I clearly made Cross uncomfortable as we pointed out dozens of soft targets for the Iraqi terrorists believed at that time to be coming in from Canada. One that I pointed out was the fuel pipeline from New Haven to Westover AFB....much of the pipe was above ground, crossing mostly railroad bridges...easy to disrupt. When FBI HQ crunched the numbers, they found there were not enough fuel trucks to replace the supply to homes in New England. A simple means for any terrorists to sew non-fatal disruption and cause people to question government protection.
As James Fallows writes in the foward to Brave New War: "Any of the tens of millions of foreigners entering the country (USA) each year could, in theory, be an enemy operative -- to say nothing of the millions of potential recurits already in place. Any of the dozens of ports, the scores of natural-gas plants and nuclear facilities, the hundreds of important bridges and tunnels, or the thousands of shopping malls, office towers, or sporting facilities could be the next target of attack. It is impossible to protect them all, and even trying could ruin America's social fabric and the public finances."
That last point is highly significant.
There is no "War on Terrorism" because terrorism is a tactic....just as an ambush or airstrike.
But a central goal of terrorism as a tactic is to cause the host government to over-react, spend money and devote resources to the problem while cracking down severely on the general public and sewing distrust in government.
Many have argued the only way to eliminate "terrorism" is to solve the problems which generate the employment of this tactic. Robb argues that self-reliant communities can cause this tactic to be less effective because the community is resilient.
On Page x is the mention that five people died in the anthrax scare after 9/11 but the U.S. Postal Service spent $5 billion on protective measures for screening etc. and congressional mail was delayed up to eight months.
This leads to the introduction of Robb's concept of "super-power baiting" and the use of terror to sucker the large government into over-reacting and clamping down on the public.
Fallows points out that the U.S. (unlike the British idea of divide and conquer) is causing enemies to unite -- and the Internet is a damn good means to unite like-minded people from separate communities.
Robb says globalization (like bullet-proofing Pentagon contracts by having parts made in 38 states) is linking nations together economically --- and this linkage has critical bottlenecks and crucial areas open to attack by clever enemies.....especially foes linked by the Internet.
Chapter 1 has much about "systems disruption" and the funding of insurgent operations. Page 6 mentions a Carl Prine-type situation ... but in southeastern Iraq where a $2,000 attack caused the loss of about $500 million in oil revenue (a return on investment of 25 million percent).
"To really understand this future," Robb writes, "you need to discard the idea of state-vrs-state conflict. That age is over! It ended with the rise of nuclear weapons, the integration of the world's economies, and the end of the Cold War."
The Internet (and other factors, of course) have led to what Robb has termed "super-empowered groups" like al Qaeda. "The rise of super-empowered groups is part of a larger historical trend," he writes. "This trend is in the process of putting ever-more-powerful technological tools and the knowledge of how to use them into an ever-increasing number of hands."
Attached to this discussion entry is a report from USAF Aim Points, an online briefing report, on some captured al Qaeda documents. The most interesting point to me in this report, is how al Qaeda (often translated as "The Base") really should be thought of as "The Foundation" like the Ford Foundation or the MacArthur Foundation.
These captured documents seem to indicate that al Qaeda is a clearing house -- much like a group that reviews grant applications -- which reviews proposals from around the world and assists in resources (personnel, expertise, money, training, etc.) if the applicant's ideas fit into al Qaeda's overall strategy.
Chapter 2 is the introduction to critical infrastructure points vulnerable to sabatoge.
Which “offers guerrillas the means to bring a modern nation’s economy to its knees and thereby undermine the legitimacy of the state sworn to protect it.” And Robb points out, “the perpetrators of this new form of warfare, however, aren’t really terrorists, because they no longer have terror as their goal or method.”
And, as in Vietnam, the news media usually follows the old model…just as early coverage of Iraq followed the Gulf War model and coverage concentrated on U.S. troop movements and not all that was being passed up and not protected.
Robb says, “Decentralized networks that are more robust and learn more quickly than traditional hierarchies” and this can be seen in the CNN video on the “Twitter Revolution” on the Home Page. But at least Gates and Clinton are shown admitting they realize something is going on, but they cannot get a handle on it. Boyd’s O-O-D-A concept is moving too slowly….and they are only at the Observe point. Robb also points out how disparate groups can “swarm” when convenient….they can use this alternative social media to get around state control and cause people to come together…as in Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc.
He says this also allows guerrillas to “coordinate their actions to swarm vulnerable targets” and “what is most disturbing about this development is that the methods used by the global guerrillas we see in action in Iraq are spreading over the entire globe.”
Robb writes: “The culprits are globalization and the Internet. This new environment is sweeping aside state power in ways no army could. States are losing control of their borders, economies, finances, people and communications….They are so intertwined that no independent action can be taken without serious repercussions on multiple levels.”
“Non-state actors in the form of terrorists, crime syndicates, gangs and networked tribes are stepping into the breach (the vacuum of state power) to lay claim to areas once in the sole control of states. Current examples might be MEND in the Niger Delta and Guinea-Bissau in West Africa, or the on-going battles in northern Mexico, even the pirate actions off East Africa, and certainly the Taliban-supported conflicts in Pakistan and Afghanistan fueled by narcotics money. None of this has anything to do with two nation states fighting each other.
Robb says (and I agree) the main goal of al Qaeda as a terrorist foundation is to approve operations which will lead to failed nation states so the dream of an Islamic Caliphate – a sort of Muslim entity like the United States or the European Union or the old Japanese idea of the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. If people can imagine an Islamic world stretching from West Africa to Indonesia then failed nation states works into that idea of promoting chaos to bring about change.
Robb writes: “Even to itself, al Qaeda is seen more as a movement, an instigator of change, rather than as the primary mechanism for seizing control of a nation-state. In this role, al Qaeda is a spoiler of order, a mechanism that creates the chaos necessary for change.”
When Osama bin Laden went back to Afghanistan in 1996, he had no intention of taking any control of the Taliban, just to use their area as a base for his wider view of getting the U.S. out of Saudi Arabia, and the Middle East, getting a fair price for oil, and getting rid of Israel. To bin Laden, the concept of the U.S. supporting Israel and the Saudi royal family allowing the U.S. to remain in country after the Gulf War was just too much to take for a believer in a greater dream like an Islamic Caliphate.
U.S. news media reporting was way behind the O-O-D-A loop after 9/11 and must share blame with the U.S. government for portraying the conflict as going after Muslim terrorists, and in the process generating more enemies and spreading the chaos al Qaeda needs for nation states to fail. Pakistan was enough of a mess with internal strife and the on-going conflict with India without the U.S. actions in Afghanistan spilling over their weak border areas.
Fourth-generation warfare is also seen as a means of sapping the strength and finances of nations so weak forces can outlast the strong. Israeli historian Martin van Creveld in his 1991 book, The Transformation of War, (I would have assigned this as a text if the course was longer) argues “when the strong fight the weak, they become weak.”
Basically, van Creveld says when a state takes on a guerrilla movement, the state will lose. There have been notable exceptions, but these exceptions always had another factor, often religion or ethnic underpinnings, which did not allow the guerrilla to fade into the civilian population.
Robb says, “As the state’s soldiers continue to fight weak foes, they will eventually become as ill-disciplined and vicious as the people they are fighting, due to frustration and mirror imaging” and “Citizens lose their feeling of solidarity with the goals of their government when they perceive it to be acting immorally.” We have seen so many examples of this – Vietnam, Gaza, water-boarding, airstrikes taking out villages.
This is where the grey area between journalism and intelligence comes to the fore. Both groups, using open-source materials – OSINT – need to pay attention to the other factors in play and not just military operations.
Robb points out the first application of global fourth-generation warfare noticed by most Americans was 9/11. This was, in his words, “an autonomous non-state group not acting as a proxy of a foreign power” so more like the fictional enemies Ian Fleming created to challenge James Bond in popular novels.
He says, “Al Qaeda also (slowly) learned another major lesson of the attack: that an attack on systems can magnify the effect of a small attack into a major global economic event. Because of the impact of systems, a $250,000 attack was converted into an event that cost the U.S. over $80 billion (some estimates as high as $500 billion).
Remember reading about Brig. Gen. Jimmy Doolittle creatively using B-25s off an aircraft carrier to strike Tokyo in 1942? That strike did little damage, but gave the U.S. public a well-needed shot in the arm, and cause the Japanese to keep thousands of aircraft based in the home islands for defense. The move was brilliant…..the U.S. cost of that raid compared to the Japanese costs was enormous. Think about this when you view the Carl Prine videos.
Chapter 3 explains Effects-Based Operations the U.S. doctrine of destroying infrastructure to cause enemy systems to collapse…..and also the systems which support normal life for civilians. While these work in a military sense, there is also the humanitarian position (which the military usually leaves to civilian agencies like the State Dept.) and the idea “Dat’s not my job!”
Okay to blow up dams, bridges, highways, power plants, rail lines, etc., but putting the Humpty-Dumpty pieces back together before people starve or flee as refugees is a difficult task. And if the enemy goal (in this case the al Qaeda idea of a Muslim Caliphate) is chaos and failed nation-states, then EBO works just great for them!
I saw this in Vietnam. I was flying one day in early 1966 with a battalion commander over his area of operations. I looked down and was shocked that every farmhouse was destroyed. My battalion – also in the 101st Airborne – did not operate that way. When asked, the colonel said, “We only hit structures from which we received fire.”
I was a 21-year-old sergeant then, but I knew the operation of my battalion was right and this West Pointer was wrong. Every one of those destroyed farmhouses had housed a family…..was so damn easy for a small Viet Cong unit to shoot and scoot from house to house so this battalion would call in artillery or air strikes. This paratrooper colonel was doing exactly what the Viet Cong wanted….generating hatred and aiding recruiting.
My battalion, under a very savvy colonel (who later became a three-star general) operated with the idea we wanted to push the Viet Cong out of the populated areas and into the jungle away from the people – so they could be destroyed.
Robb points out that during World War II the average was that only 20 percent of bombs dropped came within 1,000 feet of the intended target. Despite improvements with GPS, laser targeting, smart bombs, etc., there are still many munitions which land far off target and sometimes cause civilian damage and casualties.
There is a mention in Chapter 3 of Saddam recognizing in 1995 that the next war with the U.S. would initially be like the Gulf War, so he created the Fedayeen Saddam (just like the stay-behind U.S. forces in Germany during the Cold War) who would attack after the enemy troops rolled past.
In August 2002, Saddam had commanders stash weapons and munitions in the countryside for this type of rear-guard action. But the U.S. assisted by by-passing Iraqi munition caches and bases, and then Paul Bremer fired the Iraqi army and sent them into unemployment.
Saddam’s fourth-generation warriors formally kicked off their campaign of systems disruption on 12 June 2003 with the sabotage of the Kirkuk-Ceyhan oil pipeline in the north of Iraq which accounted for a third of daily oil production. We are seeing this same type of operation this week by MEND against Royal Dutch Shell in the Niger Delta. Strikes against the supply infrastructure (read that economic) as an EBO method against the larger military force of the government.
While targeting the oil pipelines pops out as a good EBO method to thwart the U.S. invaders, there was another campaign going on by Iraqi insurgents….the electrical power grid which the U.S. was trying to restore for the Iraqi economy to recover.
“To stymie this progress, Iraq’s global guerrillas have conducted a systematic campaign aimed at critical nodes of the Iraqi power system,” writes Robb. “They have cut hundreds of high-voltage transmission lines, toppled thousands for electrical towers, disrupted power plant fuel lines, and assaulted Western engineers. As soon as repairs are made, they attack again. The results have been spectacular.” He says Baghdad, home to 40 percent of the country’s population, saw only a couple hours of electricity a day as up to 40 percent of Iraq’s electricity was in a constant state of disruption.
“This induced failure has had its desired effect. The Coalition lost its legitimacy, largely because of its inability to deliver the basic service of electricity.”
He quotes UPI reporter Beth Potter writing in 2005 that “Iraqi voters aren’t happy. They don’t care that some of the biggest political changes ever to happen in their lifetime are going on in their country. All they know is that the electricity still is off for hours every day, the water doesn’t always flow out of the faucets, there are still long gas queues at the stations, and the situation sill seems pretty lawless in the streets.”
Long-Tail Warfare in Section Two looks at the establishment of the nation state and constraints on total war with professional armies (yeah, with conscripts) battling mostly on open land and not destroying cities.
He also notes dictator Hafez Assad of Syria besieged Hama in 1982, surrounded the city (home to the Muslim Brotherhood) with tanks and artillery, blew up the escape routes and called in air strikes for days. But unlike the Israeli operation this year in Gaza, Assad followed up “with house-to-house searches, executions and bulldozers. Twenty thousand people died (some estimates are as high as 40,000).”
Robb uses Amazon.com as an example of the long-tail idea. He says in the past, there were a few top products which had the majority of sales, and then the other products trailed off…..like General Motors and Ford compared to smaller firms or Ivory Soap etc. having a large share of market. Robb says the Internet has changed this idea…and cites Anderson’s work on Amazon.com making money by offering hundreds of thousands of titles….and more than half the income comes outside the 130,000 books offered by Barns and Nobel. Money made by the small titles with only a some people interested……but a hell of a lot of them.
Another example might be Armin Meiwes, a 42-year-old computer technician from Rothenburg, Germany, guy who posted on the Internet that he would really like to dine on a penis…..sure enough, in 2003 Bernd-Jurgen Brandes answered the advert and went voluntarily to Meiwes' home, where he agreed to having cut his penis off. Meiwes then cooked it and served it up for them to eat together.
Far more than a gruesome tale, this is an illustration of Robb’s long-tail idea….post it on the Internet and somebody will probably support your idea. Amazon will put nearly any book online, and out there is someone willing to purchase.
Robb says the insurgency in Iraq (and one can argue Pakistan) is “not a single army with one goal. Instead, it’s actually made up of hundreds of small groups (seventy-five of which have been identified) currently operating in Iraq.” He describes these people as “lots of small niche providers of violence. All these groups are in competition, but at the same time they are willing to work together to fight the United States…”
He pegs this development on three ideas……decentralization of the tools of warfare, insurgents do not need aircraft or tanks just easily obtained tools, unlimited shelf space raising an force means only finding a dozen like-minded people, and low barriers to entry, like the old Irish joke, “Is this a private fight or can anyone join in?” “Potential bombers don’t need to agree with the leadership, get support from them, or even know them. Conducting their own operation is enough.”
Robb, writing in 2007, says according to the U.S. military, the U.S. is capturing or killing insurgents at a rate of 1,000-3,000 a month, and 14,000 insurgents were being held in U.S. prisons in Iraq. “If taken in total, the entire insurgency had been destroyed or imprisoned at least once since the invasion. Typically, when an organization suffers this level of losses, we would expect to see a catastrophic fall off in the quality and quantity of attacks. This hasn’t happened. In fact, exactly the opposite has happened.”
One could probably make the same argument in Afghanistan. Unlike Vietnam, where this was also true, there is no Ho Chi Minh Trail to blame as the path for troops pouring down from North Vietnam.
This enemy is home grown -- sure foreign fighters are involved, but never on a massive scale as in Vietnam or the Chinese entry into the Korean War.
Both journalists and intelligence analysts have to understand the historical and contemporary reasons the insurgency is self-supporting and growing….along with the idea that strong nations attacking the weak become weaker and lose their financial resources and public support.
There is a news article posted on 22 June 2009 that Gen. McChrystal has ordered U.S. airstrikes in Afghanistan to be limited nearly to “Broken Arrow” status when forces are in danger of being overrun. While this might be over-reaction, one must remember that the U.S. has been dropping bombs in Afghanistan since 2001….that’s a lot of civilian casualties over the past eight years. Issuing press releases and showing precision bombing videos does not gloss over the basic danger in generating new enemies.
Robb also mentions primary loyalties. He says counter insurgencies require the support of the public, just as Mao said the guerrilla moves through the sea of the people. So the people are (or should be) key to both sides.
Primary loyalty is a form of ancient moral connection that transcends loyalty to the nation state, according to Robb. These include connection to family, clan, tribe, gang, religion and ethnicity. Think of the Italians in South Boston or just about any Greek or Armenian community in America. And think also of Tammany Hall’s Boss Tweed among the Irish of New York City.
Robb writes: “...attacks on the fuel and electricity infrastructure (in Iraq) force people to look to primary loyalties for economic support. The ongoing need for protection and economic survival creates a cycle that strips the state of any remaining legitimacy.”
In short, but very good sections, Robb quickly describes the Chechen revolt, MEND in Nigeria, the Balochs in Pakistan and Islamic separatists in Thailand. We also have the recent example of Pakistanis/Kashmiri in Mumbai. On Page 85 he mentions the power of the mobile phone (which today pales compared to the social networking situation going on in Iran).
In the next part, we will take a look at Robb’s take on paramilitaries, the Minutemen in the U.S., and private military companies hiring mercenaries.
I soon became a fan of Robb's Brave New War blog and his book of the same title.
Robb brings up great points, and today is really blogging about self-reliant communities instead of seeking overall government control of nations.
He points out on Page vii the 2004 Osama bin Laden message countering President Bush's spin claim that Al Qaeda was against freedom and democracy. "Why did we not attack Sweden?" asked bin Laden.
Robb's critique of open societies -- very much in line with the opinions of Carl Prine -- reminded me of my own involvement during the Gulf War with the FBI's New England Anti-terrorist Task Force.
I was in USAF intelligence then (around October 1990) and assigned as intel laison to the task force (posse commitatus and all that stuff) along with Capt. Daniel Jamroz of the Mass. State Police and other cops and spooks. We worked for FBI Special Agent Leonard Cross (today a private security consultant).
Danny and I clearly made Cross uncomfortable as we pointed out dozens of soft targets for the Iraqi terrorists believed at that time to be coming in from Canada. One that I pointed out was the fuel pipeline from New Haven to Westover AFB....much of the pipe was above ground, crossing mostly railroad bridges...easy to disrupt. When FBI HQ crunched the numbers, they found there were not enough fuel trucks to replace the supply to homes in New England. A simple means for any terrorists to sew non-fatal disruption and cause people to question government protection.
As James Fallows writes in the foward to Brave New War: "Any of the tens of millions of foreigners entering the country (USA) each year could, in theory, be an enemy operative -- to say nothing of the millions of potential recurits already in place. Any of the dozens of ports, the scores of natural-gas plants and nuclear facilities, the hundreds of important bridges and tunnels, or the thousands of shopping malls, office towers, or sporting facilities could be the next target of attack. It is impossible to protect them all, and even trying could ruin America's social fabric and the public finances."
That last point is highly significant.
There is no "War on Terrorism" because terrorism is a tactic....just as an ambush or airstrike.
But a central goal of terrorism as a tactic is to cause the host government to over-react, spend money and devote resources to the problem while cracking down severely on the general public and sewing distrust in government.
Many have argued the only way to eliminate "terrorism" is to solve the problems which generate the employment of this tactic. Robb argues that self-reliant communities can cause this tactic to be less effective because the community is resilient.
On Page x is the mention that five people died in the anthrax scare after 9/11 but the U.S. Postal Service spent $5 billion on protective measures for screening etc. and congressional mail was delayed up to eight months.
This leads to the introduction of Robb's concept of "super-power baiting" and the use of terror to sucker the large government into over-reacting and clamping down on the public.
Fallows points out that the U.S. (unlike the British idea of divide and conquer) is causing enemies to unite -- and the Internet is a damn good means to unite like-minded people from separate communities.
Robb says globalization (like bullet-proofing Pentagon contracts by having parts made in 38 states) is linking nations together economically --- and this linkage has critical bottlenecks and crucial areas open to attack by clever enemies.....especially foes linked by the Internet.
Chapter 1 has much about "systems disruption" and the funding of insurgent operations. Page 6 mentions a Carl Prine-type situation ... but in southeastern Iraq where a $2,000 attack caused the loss of about $500 million in oil revenue (a return on investment of 25 million percent).
"To really understand this future," Robb writes, "you need to discard the idea of state-vrs-state conflict. That age is over! It ended with the rise of nuclear weapons, the integration of the world's economies, and the end of the Cold War."
The Internet (and other factors, of course) have led to what Robb has termed "super-empowered groups" like al Qaeda. "The rise of super-empowered groups is part of a larger historical trend," he writes. "This trend is in the process of putting ever-more-powerful technological tools and the knowledge of how to use them into an ever-increasing number of hands."
Attached to this discussion entry is a report from USAF Aim Points, an online briefing report, on some captured al Qaeda documents. The most interesting point to me in this report, is how al Qaeda (often translated as "The Base") really should be thought of as "The Foundation" like the Ford Foundation or the MacArthur Foundation.
These captured documents seem to indicate that al Qaeda is a clearing house -- much like a group that reviews grant applications -- which reviews proposals from around the world and assists in resources (personnel, expertise, money, training, etc.) if the applicant's ideas fit into al Qaeda's overall strategy.
Chapter 2 is the introduction to critical infrastructure points vulnerable to sabatoge.
Which “offers guerrillas the means to bring a modern nation’s economy to its knees and thereby undermine the legitimacy of the state sworn to protect it.” And Robb points out, “the perpetrators of this new form of warfare, however, aren’t really terrorists, because they no longer have terror as their goal or method.”
And, as in Vietnam, the news media usually follows the old model…just as early coverage of Iraq followed the Gulf War model and coverage concentrated on U.S. troop movements and not all that was being passed up and not protected.
Robb says, “Decentralized networks that are more robust and learn more quickly than traditional hierarchies” and this can be seen in the CNN video on the “Twitter Revolution” on the Home Page. But at least Gates and Clinton are shown admitting they realize something is going on, but they cannot get a handle on it. Boyd’s O-O-D-A concept is moving too slowly….and they are only at the Observe point. Robb also points out how disparate groups can “swarm” when convenient….they can use this alternative social media to get around state control and cause people to come together…as in Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc.
He says this also allows guerrillas to “coordinate their actions to swarm vulnerable targets” and “what is most disturbing about this development is that the methods used by the global guerrillas we see in action in Iraq are spreading over the entire globe.”
Robb writes: “The culprits are globalization and the Internet. This new environment is sweeping aside state power in ways no army could. States are losing control of their borders, economies, finances, people and communications….They are so intertwined that no independent action can be taken without serious repercussions on multiple levels.”
“Non-state actors in the form of terrorists, crime syndicates, gangs and networked tribes are stepping into the breach (the vacuum of state power) to lay claim to areas once in the sole control of states. Current examples might be MEND in the Niger Delta and Guinea-Bissau in West Africa, or the on-going battles in northern Mexico, even the pirate actions off East Africa, and certainly the Taliban-supported conflicts in Pakistan and Afghanistan fueled by narcotics money. None of this has anything to do with two nation states fighting each other.
Robb says (and I agree) the main goal of al Qaeda as a terrorist foundation is to approve operations which will lead to failed nation states so the dream of an Islamic Caliphate – a sort of Muslim entity like the United States or the European Union or the old Japanese idea of the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. If people can imagine an Islamic world stretching from West Africa to Indonesia then failed nation states works into that idea of promoting chaos to bring about change.
Robb writes: “Even to itself, al Qaeda is seen more as a movement, an instigator of change, rather than as the primary mechanism for seizing control of a nation-state. In this role, al Qaeda is a spoiler of order, a mechanism that creates the chaos necessary for change.”
When Osama bin Laden went back to Afghanistan in 1996, he had no intention of taking any control of the Taliban, just to use their area as a base for his wider view of getting the U.S. out of Saudi Arabia, and the Middle East, getting a fair price for oil, and getting rid of Israel. To bin Laden, the concept of the U.S. supporting Israel and the Saudi royal family allowing the U.S. to remain in country after the Gulf War was just too much to take for a believer in a greater dream like an Islamic Caliphate.
U.S. news media reporting was way behind the O-O-D-A loop after 9/11 and must share blame with the U.S. government for portraying the conflict as going after Muslim terrorists, and in the process generating more enemies and spreading the chaos al Qaeda needs for nation states to fail. Pakistan was enough of a mess with internal strife and the on-going conflict with India without the U.S. actions in Afghanistan spilling over their weak border areas.
Fourth-generation warfare is also seen as a means of sapping the strength and finances of nations so weak forces can outlast the strong. Israeli historian Martin van Creveld in his 1991 book, The Transformation of War, (I would have assigned this as a text if the course was longer) argues “when the strong fight the weak, they become weak.”
Basically, van Creveld says when a state takes on a guerrilla movement, the state will lose. There have been notable exceptions, but these exceptions always had another factor, often religion or ethnic underpinnings, which did not allow the guerrilla to fade into the civilian population.
Robb says, “As the state’s soldiers continue to fight weak foes, they will eventually become as ill-disciplined and vicious as the people they are fighting, due to frustration and mirror imaging” and “Citizens lose their feeling of solidarity with the goals of their government when they perceive it to be acting immorally.” We have seen so many examples of this – Vietnam, Gaza, water-boarding, airstrikes taking out villages.
This is where the grey area between journalism and intelligence comes to the fore. Both groups, using open-source materials – OSINT – need to pay attention to the other factors in play and not just military operations.
Robb points out the first application of global fourth-generation warfare noticed by most Americans was 9/11. This was, in his words, “an autonomous non-state group not acting as a proxy of a foreign power” so more like the fictional enemies Ian Fleming created to challenge James Bond in popular novels.
He says, “Al Qaeda also (slowly) learned another major lesson of the attack: that an attack on systems can magnify the effect of a small attack into a major global economic event. Because of the impact of systems, a $250,000 attack was converted into an event that cost the U.S. over $80 billion (some estimates as high as $500 billion).
Remember reading about Brig. Gen. Jimmy Doolittle creatively using B-25s off an aircraft carrier to strike Tokyo in 1942? That strike did little damage, but gave the U.S. public a well-needed shot in the arm, and cause the Japanese to keep thousands of aircraft based in the home islands for defense. The move was brilliant…..the U.S. cost of that raid compared to the Japanese costs was enormous. Think about this when you view the Carl Prine videos.
Chapter 3 explains Effects-Based Operations the U.S. doctrine of destroying infrastructure to cause enemy systems to collapse…..and also the systems which support normal life for civilians. While these work in a military sense, there is also the humanitarian position (which the military usually leaves to civilian agencies like the State Dept.) and the idea “Dat’s not my job!”
Okay to blow up dams, bridges, highways, power plants, rail lines, etc., but putting the Humpty-Dumpty pieces back together before people starve or flee as refugees is a difficult task. And if the enemy goal (in this case the al Qaeda idea of a Muslim Caliphate) is chaos and failed nation-states, then EBO works just great for them!
I saw this in Vietnam. I was flying one day in early 1966 with a battalion commander over his area of operations. I looked down and was shocked that every farmhouse was destroyed. My battalion – also in the 101st Airborne – did not operate that way. When asked, the colonel said, “We only hit structures from which we received fire.”
I was a 21-year-old sergeant then, but I knew the operation of my battalion was right and this West Pointer was wrong. Every one of those destroyed farmhouses had housed a family…..was so damn easy for a small Viet Cong unit to shoot and scoot from house to house so this battalion would call in artillery or air strikes. This paratrooper colonel was doing exactly what the Viet Cong wanted….generating hatred and aiding recruiting.
My battalion, under a very savvy colonel (who later became a three-star general) operated with the idea we wanted to push the Viet Cong out of the populated areas and into the jungle away from the people – so they could be destroyed.
Robb points out that during World War II the average was that only 20 percent of bombs dropped came within 1,000 feet of the intended target. Despite improvements with GPS, laser targeting, smart bombs, etc., there are still many munitions which land far off target and sometimes cause civilian damage and casualties.
There is a mention in Chapter 3 of Saddam recognizing in 1995 that the next war with the U.S. would initially be like the Gulf War, so he created the Fedayeen Saddam (just like the stay-behind U.S. forces in Germany during the Cold War) who would attack after the enemy troops rolled past.
In August 2002, Saddam had commanders stash weapons and munitions in the countryside for this type of rear-guard action. But the U.S. assisted by by-passing Iraqi munition caches and bases, and then Paul Bremer fired the Iraqi army and sent them into unemployment.
Saddam’s fourth-generation warriors formally kicked off their campaign of systems disruption on 12 June 2003 with the sabotage of the Kirkuk-Ceyhan oil pipeline in the north of Iraq which accounted for a third of daily oil production. We are seeing this same type of operation this week by MEND against Royal Dutch Shell in the Niger Delta. Strikes against the supply infrastructure (read that economic) as an EBO method against the larger military force of the government.
While targeting the oil pipelines pops out as a good EBO method to thwart the U.S. invaders, there was another campaign going on by Iraqi insurgents….the electrical power grid which the U.S. was trying to restore for the Iraqi economy to recover.
“To stymie this progress, Iraq’s global guerrillas have conducted a systematic campaign aimed at critical nodes of the Iraqi power system,” writes Robb. “They have cut hundreds of high-voltage transmission lines, toppled thousands for electrical towers, disrupted power plant fuel lines, and assaulted Western engineers. As soon as repairs are made, they attack again. The results have been spectacular.” He says Baghdad, home to 40 percent of the country’s population, saw only a couple hours of electricity a day as up to 40 percent of Iraq’s electricity was in a constant state of disruption.
“This induced failure has had its desired effect. The Coalition lost its legitimacy, largely because of its inability to deliver the basic service of electricity.”
He quotes UPI reporter Beth Potter writing in 2005 that “Iraqi voters aren’t happy. They don’t care that some of the biggest political changes ever to happen in their lifetime are going on in their country. All they know is that the electricity still is off for hours every day, the water doesn’t always flow out of the faucets, there are still long gas queues at the stations, and the situation sill seems pretty lawless in the streets.”
Long-Tail Warfare in Section Two looks at the establishment of the nation state and constraints on total war with professional armies (yeah, with conscripts) battling mostly on open land and not destroying cities.
He also notes dictator Hafez Assad of Syria besieged Hama in 1982, surrounded the city (home to the Muslim Brotherhood) with tanks and artillery, blew up the escape routes and called in air strikes for days. But unlike the Israeli operation this year in Gaza, Assad followed up “with house-to-house searches, executions and bulldozers. Twenty thousand people died (some estimates are as high as 40,000).”
Robb uses Amazon.com as an example of the long-tail idea. He says in the past, there were a few top products which had the majority of sales, and then the other products trailed off…..like General Motors and Ford compared to smaller firms or Ivory Soap etc. having a large share of market. Robb says the Internet has changed this idea…and cites Anderson’s work on Amazon.com making money by offering hundreds of thousands of titles….and more than half the income comes outside the 130,000 books offered by Barns and Nobel. Money made by the small titles with only a some people interested……but a hell of a lot of them.
Another example might be Armin Meiwes, a 42-year-old computer technician from Rothenburg, Germany, guy who posted on the Internet that he would really like to dine on a penis…..sure enough, in 2003 Bernd-Jurgen Brandes answered the advert and went voluntarily to Meiwes' home, where he agreed to having cut his penis off. Meiwes then cooked it and served it up for them to eat together.
Far more than a gruesome tale, this is an illustration of Robb’s long-tail idea….post it on the Internet and somebody will probably support your idea. Amazon will put nearly any book online, and out there is someone willing to purchase.
Robb says the insurgency in Iraq (and one can argue Pakistan) is “not a single army with one goal. Instead, it’s actually made up of hundreds of small groups (seventy-five of which have been identified) currently operating in Iraq.” He describes these people as “lots of small niche providers of violence. All these groups are in competition, but at the same time they are willing to work together to fight the United States…”
He pegs this development on three ideas……decentralization of the tools of warfare, insurgents do not need aircraft or tanks just easily obtained tools, unlimited shelf space raising an force means only finding a dozen like-minded people, and low barriers to entry, like the old Irish joke, “Is this a private fight or can anyone join in?” “Potential bombers don’t need to agree with the leadership, get support from them, or even know them. Conducting their own operation is enough.”
Robb, writing in 2007, says according to the U.S. military, the U.S. is capturing or killing insurgents at a rate of 1,000-3,000 a month, and 14,000 insurgents were being held in U.S. prisons in Iraq. “If taken in total, the entire insurgency had been destroyed or imprisoned at least once since the invasion. Typically, when an organization suffers this level of losses, we would expect to see a catastrophic fall off in the quality and quantity of attacks. This hasn’t happened. In fact, exactly the opposite has happened.”
One could probably make the same argument in Afghanistan. Unlike Vietnam, where this was also true, there is no Ho Chi Minh Trail to blame as the path for troops pouring down from North Vietnam.
This enemy is home grown -- sure foreign fighters are involved, but never on a massive scale as in Vietnam or the Chinese entry into the Korean War.
Both journalists and intelligence analysts have to understand the historical and contemporary reasons the insurgency is self-supporting and growing….along with the idea that strong nations attacking the weak become weaker and lose their financial resources and public support.
There is a news article posted on 22 June 2009 that Gen. McChrystal has ordered U.S. airstrikes in Afghanistan to be limited nearly to “Broken Arrow” status when forces are in danger of being overrun. While this might be over-reaction, one must remember that the U.S. has been dropping bombs in Afghanistan since 2001….that’s a lot of civilian casualties over the past eight years. Issuing press releases and showing precision bombing videos does not gloss over the basic danger in generating new enemies.
Robb also mentions primary loyalties. He says counter insurgencies require the support of the public, just as Mao said the guerrilla moves through the sea of the people. So the people are (or should be) key to both sides.
Primary loyalty is a form of ancient moral connection that transcends loyalty to the nation state, according to Robb. These include connection to family, clan, tribe, gang, religion and ethnicity. Think of the Italians in South Boston or just about any Greek or Armenian community in America. And think also of Tammany Hall’s Boss Tweed among the Irish of New York City.
Robb writes: “...attacks on the fuel and electricity infrastructure (in Iraq) force people to look to primary loyalties for economic support. The ongoing need for protection and economic survival creates a cycle that strips the state of any remaining legitimacy.”
In short, but very good sections, Robb quickly describes the Chechen revolt, MEND in Nigeria, the Balochs in Pakistan and Islamic separatists in Thailand. We also have the recent example of Pakistanis/Kashmiri in Mumbai. On Page 85 he mentions the power of the mobile phone (which today pales compared to the social networking situation going on in Iran).
In the next part, we will take a look at Robb’s take on paramilitaries, the Minutemen in the U.S., and private military companies hiring mercenaries.
Col. John Boyd ond O-O-D-A Loops
Col. John Boyd and O-O-D-A Loops
O-O-D-A stands for Observe-Orientate-Decide-Act and was developed by a USAF officer for air-to-air combat training. John Boyd was an instructor pilot who would bet his students that he could “down” them in mock aerial combat within 40 seconds.
His major trick was to go back to real stick-n-rudder flying and employ the barrel roll or Immelmann turn (a 1914 Great War tactic credited to Oberleutnant Max Immelmann of a half-turn combined with a half-loop) to reverse the direction of an aircraft. This use of maneuver came in the Fifties and Sixties when pilots believed “speed was life” and heat-seeking missles were being pushed by aircraft designers and Air Force planners.
Boyd developed and taught the idea of O “see’em” then O “orientate, or get in the best position” D decide quickly and A act decisively. Sounds simple enough for aerial combat or even hunting deer…..but Boyd went on to brief military officers about many other applications, including guerrilla warfare.
Then came the business applications….as in marketing…O spot the need and potential market O orientate or get your firm in position D decide how to get your product to market etc. and A act quickly to capture the market before the competition.
This concept has been applied to medical practices, rugby teams, etc. and countering insurgencies. And is sometimes heard as “getting inside the other guy’s O-O-D-A loop” by beating the opponent to the punch on the four-part idea.
Sometimes this has been presented as S-O-D-A for Sense-Orientate-Decide-Act
There is a short YouTube presentation on Boyd http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivTBv3wnp1Y&feature=related
There is also a four-part Boyd lecture at the Air University but the video and audio quality is very low. Here is Part 4 on no dumb questions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zbbh9bYOOok&feature=related
In analysis tasks, such as journalism and intelligence, the sense or Observe part is what most of us need to hone as a sharper skill……exactly WHAT are we observing? Or, are things going on and we are not observing or even sensing? Are these people hot, cold, starving, educated, poor, religious fanatics, anti-corruption, smugglers, etc……WHAT are we seeing or WHAT should we be looking for?
The Orientation segment is fixing this observation in time, history, parallel situations or areas of the world, etc. How does all this fit together? There have always been poor people and hungry people, what might make this situation different?
Decide might pertain to devoting resources – even your own time – to work on this situation or develop the concept…and Act would be to report and distribute the information to the public or leadership in time for further action.
How long did the U.S. take to O-O-D-A the idea that inaccurate airstrikes were generating more opposition in Afghanistan and triggering political unrest in Pakistan?
What about the politics of engaging traditional concepts; like the U.S. Army knows when to call in air strikes and the USAF knows how to hit targets? What about the bureaucratic model (as in Allisonian analysis) idea that the White House establishes the Pentagon’s “rules of engagement” and the ground and air units are following them correctly?
At what point do savvy journalists or intelligence analysts observe the counter-productive results of following the approved ROE and dig in and add analytical input to the public and leadership?
I have been talking about increasing battlefield depth for more than 15 years (even used the strategy in a faculty/management conflict on campus) but I until the past month I have seen little in the news media about the success of this strategy with the Chechens striking Russia and today watching the Taliban in Pakistan. These city attacks are having an impact in Pakistan, but with this cause a backlash against the Taliban? Or, will this undermine support for the government (can’t protect the people, more conscripts needed, etc.)
A significant factor in Observing is knowing history….what happened elsewhere and what happened in this particular area? If we are bird watchers, we might spot a red-throated tit where someone else might just see a bird. But if we really study Parus fringillinus then we know this bird belongs on the savannah and not here in River City, so something is up.
The U.S. military has developed a reading list for different ranks in the armed services….some good reading there. The idea is to have more soldiers, sailors and aviators understanding the history and strategic concepts so they will be better observers and thinkers….stuff like how did Napoleon’s campaign fail in Russia? or how did Lawrence of Arabia unite the tribes?
Journalists who intend to cover or are thrown into covering insurgencies need to also become savvy very quickly….and much more than military operations, but the whole ball of wax which creates, maintains and leads an insurgency.
The next readings, from Brave New War and the Starfish and the Spider enter the middle ground between intelligence and journalism
O-O-D-A stands for Observe-Orientate-Decide-Act and was developed by a USAF officer for air-to-air combat training. John Boyd was an instructor pilot who would bet his students that he could “down” them in mock aerial combat within 40 seconds.
His major trick was to go back to real stick-n-rudder flying and employ the barrel roll or Immelmann turn (a 1914 Great War tactic credited to Oberleutnant Max Immelmann of a half-turn combined with a half-loop) to reverse the direction of an aircraft. This use of maneuver came in the Fifties and Sixties when pilots believed “speed was life” and heat-seeking missles were being pushed by aircraft designers and Air Force planners.
Boyd developed and taught the idea of O “see’em” then O “orientate, or get in the best position” D decide quickly and A act decisively. Sounds simple enough for aerial combat or even hunting deer…..but Boyd went on to brief military officers about many other applications, including guerrilla warfare.
Then came the business applications….as in marketing…O spot the need and potential market O orientate or get your firm in position D decide how to get your product to market etc. and A act quickly to capture the market before the competition.
This concept has been applied to medical practices, rugby teams, etc. and countering insurgencies. And is sometimes heard as “getting inside the other guy’s O-O-D-A loop” by beating the opponent to the punch on the four-part idea.
Sometimes this has been presented as S-O-D-A for Sense-Orientate-Decide-Act
There is a short YouTube presentation on Boyd http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivTBv3wnp1Y&feature=related
There is also a four-part Boyd lecture at the Air University but the video and audio quality is very low. Here is Part 4 on no dumb questions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zbbh9bYOOok&feature=related
In analysis tasks, such as journalism and intelligence, the sense or Observe part is what most of us need to hone as a sharper skill……exactly WHAT are we observing? Or, are things going on and we are not observing or even sensing? Are these people hot, cold, starving, educated, poor, religious fanatics, anti-corruption, smugglers, etc……WHAT are we seeing or WHAT should we be looking for?
The Orientation segment is fixing this observation in time, history, parallel situations or areas of the world, etc. How does all this fit together? There have always been poor people and hungry people, what might make this situation different?
Decide might pertain to devoting resources – even your own time – to work on this situation or develop the concept…and Act would be to report and distribute the information to the public or leadership in time for further action.
How long did the U.S. take to O-O-D-A the idea that inaccurate airstrikes were generating more opposition in Afghanistan and triggering political unrest in Pakistan?
What about the politics of engaging traditional concepts; like the U.S. Army knows when to call in air strikes and the USAF knows how to hit targets? What about the bureaucratic model (as in Allisonian analysis) idea that the White House establishes the Pentagon’s “rules of engagement” and the ground and air units are following them correctly?
At what point do savvy journalists or intelligence analysts observe the counter-productive results of following the approved ROE and dig in and add analytical input to the public and leadership?
I have been talking about increasing battlefield depth for more than 15 years (even used the strategy in a faculty/management conflict on campus) but I until the past month I have seen little in the news media about the success of this strategy with the Chechens striking Russia and today watching the Taliban in Pakistan. These city attacks are having an impact in Pakistan, but with this cause a backlash against the Taliban? Or, will this undermine support for the government (can’t protect the people, more conscripts needed, etc.)
A significant factor in Observing is knowing history….what happened elsewhere and what happened in this particular area? If we are bird watchers, we might spot a red-throated tit where someone else might just see a bird. But if we really study Parus fringillinus then we know this bird belongs on the savannah and not here in River City, so something is up.
The U.S. military has developed a reading list for different ranks in the armed services….some good reading there. The idea is to have more soldiers, sailors and aviators understanding the history and strategic concepts so they will be better observers and thinkers….stuff like how did Napoleon’s campaign fail in Russia? or how did Lawrence of Arabia unite the tribes?
Journalists who intend to cover or are thrown into covering insurgencies need to also become savvy very quickly….and much more than military operations, but the whole ball of wax which creates, maintains and leads an insurgency.
The next readings, from Brave New War and the Starfish and the Spider enter the middle ground between intelligence and journalism
UN-SPUN: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation
There is a mention on Page viii of good batters being able to spot the spin on a curveball. This is certainly great eyesight, and was the hallmark of Boston Red Soxer Ted Williams, who had a brain that could register the thread movement on the oncoming baseball.
Our brains do see patterns. Just like humans come pre-programed to see faces in objects, like the Man in the Moon or Jesus on a potato chip.
Good researchers spot patterns, too. One thing I have always looked for was the repeated phrase (usually means some response was practiced...and therefore probably practiced to hide something).
On Page xi is a mention of partisans becoming accomplices in their own deception by rejecting information -- valid or not -- merely because it conflicts with their existing beliefs. This is a major problem with many military leaders......we believe our own demonization of the enemy and fail to recognize human motives behind their actions.
Some expect Israel, the US/UK, Iran, and Arab states to follow certain distinct patters of action. Perhaps when looking at a new area and conflict, like the Niger Delta, we really do not know who is whom but soon see some evidence that allows us to place the actors into neat ideological boxes.
All this was rather easy during the Cold War when there were clients of the two great powers US/NATO-SETO and the Soviet Union. About all we had to do during the long and confusing civil war in Lebanon was look at the weaponry....AK-47s in the hands of some factions, and M-16s supplied by Israel in the hands of others.
Today there are Soviet arms all over the world. We see Indian and Pakistani soldiers with AK-47s along with the Taliban etc.
Page 17, the bin Laden baloney entry and so much of the 9/11 "inside job" lore.
Page 26, if it's scary, be wary. And Page 28 on tales that seem too good. The mention on Page 44 that "Language does our thinking for us" and the all important "Frame It and Claim It" on Page 46.
Eye candy juxtaposition of words and images is mentioned as Trick #4 on Page 51.
The "Implied Falshood" as Trick#8 on Pge 61 we have mentioned about the run up to war campaign against Saddam Hussein.
Cognitive dissonance is mentioned on Page 67 but more attention should be paid to Festinger's idea. That we really try to avoid information which conflicts with our deeply held or fundemental beliefs. Pay attention to this entire section on the psychology of deception. (If my scanner was working, I would put this entire Chapter 4 on the Home Page. The idea of "hostile media phenomenon" and "confirmation bias" are also very good.
OnPage 81 at the end of the chapter is an important mention that "Research shows that when people are forced to "counter-argue -- to express the other side's point of view as well as their own -- they are more likely to accept new evidence rather than reject it" -- and this is exactly what the intelligence analyst and journalist should be doing when looking at the other side.
Pluralistic Ignorance on Pages 93-95 covers the gap between perception and facts. During one semester of JOURNAL 300, I had students conduct an informal sidewalk poll asking if Osama bin Laden was intelligent and clever. While most respondents said NO the follow-up question of WHY brought out answers that he was quite clever. And this is the gap between emotion (respondents wanted to hate bin Laden -- or give the socially desirable negative response) but their explanations of his actions were actually very respectful of his apparent cleverness.
To quote from UNSPUN Page 95: "...in 1968, for example, only one in three white Southerners said he or she actually favored segregation, but nearly two in three said they believed a majority of whites were segregationists. To put it another way, de-segregationist whites were a big majority in the South but thought they were a minority.
This is followed by another example from early 2003 when 76 percent of Americans polled thought Saddam Hussein was providing assistance to Al Qaeda. There is also an exploration of the sinking of the USS Maine and the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. And the phony stacking of the deck during House testimony during the Gulf War....and the Page 99 idea of a military duty to lie. "Fortunately, it's not hard to get current, accurate information about other matters that bear on our well-being. Even in a world of spin, ordinary citizens can call up reliable sources of information quickly and easily on the Internet."
<
The lessons of the Great Crow Fallacy are very good. Don't confuse anecdotes with data. Remember the blind men and the elephant, which describes military briefings during the Gulf War about "smart" weapons when they were 8 percent of the munitions were guided
Not all "studies" are equal and the FactCheck.org Guide to Testing Evidence on Page 121.
Chapter 7 Osama, Ollie and Al opens with "We've said that staying unspun can save us money, embarrassment, and perhaps even our lives, but that it also requires us to adjust our mental habits so that we look actively for facts that might disprove whatever we happen to believe at the moment, rather than giving in to our hard-wired human tendency to see only supporting evidence.....The solution to spin is the Internet, if you use it carefully."
The Rules, starting on Page 156. You can't be completely certain, You can be certain enough, Look for general agreement among experts, Check primary sources (this is very important when using Wikipedia....scroll down and read some of the source material for the encyclopedic entry) and the idea that courts refuse to accept hearsay evidence.
Know what counts and Know who's talking. Seeing shouldn't necessarily be believing...and the mention that by 2007 some "189 persons have been exonerated after DNA tests showed they had been wrongly convicted...and more than 70 percent of those were convicted on the basis of mistaken eyewitness testimony.
Understand a "push" poll on Page 171.
Our brains do see patterns. Just like humans come pre-programed to see faces in objects, like the Man in the Moon or Jesus on a potato chip.
Good researchers spot patterns, too. One thing I have always looked for was the repeated phrase (usually means some response was practiced...and therefore probably practiced to hide something).
On Page xi is a mention of partisans becoming accomplices in their own deception by rejecting information -- valid or not -- merely because it conflicts with their existing beliefs. This is a major problem with many military leaders......we believe our own demonization of the enemy and fail to recognize human motives behind their actions.
Some expect Israel, the US/UK, Iran, and Arab states to follow certain distinct patters of action. Perhaps when looking at a new area and conflict, like the Niger Delta, we really do not know who is whom but soon see some evidence that allows us to place the actors into neat ideological boxes.
All this was rather easy during the Cold War when there were clients of the two great powers US/NATO-SETO and the Soviet Union. About all we had to do during the long and confusing civil war in Lebanon was look at the weaponry....AK-47s in the hands of some factions, and M-16s supplied by Israel in the hands of others.
Today there are Soviet arms all over the world. We see Indian and Pakistani soldiers with AK-47s along with the Taliban etc.
Page 17, the bin Laden baloney entry and so much of the 9/11 "inside job" lore.
Page 26, if it's scary, be wary. And Page 28 on tales that seem too good. The mention on Page 44 that "Language does our thinking for us" and the all important "Frame It and Claim It" on Page 46.
Eye candy juxtaposition of words and images is mentioned as Trick #4 on Page 51.
The "Implied Falshood" as Trick#8 on Pge 61 we have mentioned about the run up to war campaign against Saddam Hussein.
Cognitive dissonance is mentioned on Page 67 but more attention should be paid to Festinger's idea. That we really try to avoid information which conflicts with our deeply held or fundemental beliefs. Pay attention to this entire section on the psychology of deception. (If my scanner was working, I would put this entire Chapter 4 on the Home Page. The idea of "hostile media phenomenon" and "confirmation bias" are also very good.
OnPage 81 at the end of the chapter is an important mention that "Research shows that when people are forced to "counter-argue -- to express the other side's point of view as well as their own -- they are more likely to accept new evidence rather than reject it" -- and this is exactly what the intelligence analyst and journalist should be doing when looking at the other side.
Pluralistic Ignorance on Pages 93-95 covers the gap between perception and facts. During one semester of JOURNAL 300, I had students conduct an informal sidewalk poll asking if Osama bin Laden was intelligent and clever. While most respondents said NO the follow-up question of WHY brought out answers that he was quite clever. And this is the gap between emotion (respondents wanted to hate bin Laden -- or give the socially desirable negative response) but their explanations of his actions were actually very respectful of his apparent cleverness.
To quote from UNSPUN Page 95: "...in 1968, for example, only one in three white Southerners said he or she actually favored segregation, but nearly two in three said they believed a majority of whites were segregationists. To put it another way, de-segregationist whites were a big majority in the South but thought they were a minority.
This is followed by another example from early 2003 when 76 percent of Americans polled thought Saddam Hussein was providing assistance to Al Qaeda. There is also an exploration of the sinking of the USS Maine and the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. And the phony stacking of the deck during House testimony during the Gulf War....and the Page 99 idea of a military duty to lie. "Fortunately, it's not hard to get current, accurate information about other matters that bear on our well-being. Even in a world of spin, ordinary citizens can call up reliable sources of information quickly and easily on the Internet."
<
The lessons of the Great Crow Fallacy are very good. Don't confuse anecdotes with data. Remember the blind men and the elephant, which describes military briefings during the Gulf War about "smart" weapons when they were 8 percent of the munitions were guided
Not all "studies" are equal and the FactCheck.org Guide to Testing Evidence on Page 121.
Chapter 7 Osama, Ollie and Al opens with "We've said that staying unspun can save us money, embarrassment, and perhaps even our lives, but that it also requires us to adjust our mental habits so that we look actively for facts that might disprove whatever we happen to believe at the moment, rather than giving in to our hard-wired human tendency to see only supporting evidence.....The solution to spin is the Internet, if you use it carefully."
The Rules, starting on Page 156. You can't be completely certain, You can be certain enough, Look for general agreement among experts, Check primary sources (this is very important when using Wikipedia....scroll down and read some of the source material for the encyclopedic entry) and the idea that courts refuse to accept hearsay evidence.
Know what counts and Know who's talking. Seeing shouldn't necessarily be believing...and the mention that by 2007 some "189 persons have been exonerated after DNA tests showed they had been wrongly convicted...and more than 70 percent of those were convicted on the basis of mistaken eyewitness testimony.
Understand a "push" poll on Page 171.
Evolution of War Reporting
The Evolution of War Reporting
The concept of a national press changes in Vietnam as the first “Television War.”
There are a number of good books on the history of war reporting…..The First Casualty by Philip Knightly (he also wrote The Second Oldest Profession about intelligence) and also many photo books (see especially the works of Matthew Brady and Timothy O’Sullivan) on how early news reporting of wars evolved.
For this seminar, the main points are the On-The-Team reporting of World War II where news correspondents wore military uniforms with an arched “Correspondent” tab similar to a Ranger or Airborne tab. These U.S. reporters saw themselves as part of the national war effort.
The concept of the “background briefing” also came out of World War II. General of the Army George C. Marshall held nearly weekly backgrounders for top editors and national reporters to field off-the-record questions and provide not-for-attribution or off-the-record answers on the war effort. Deals were made with reporters and news agencies by the U.S. government. When, for example, the New York Times learned of the atomic bomb, the Pentagon asked for no release of the information in exchange for a seat on the bomber dropping the first nuclear device.
During World War II, reporters had their dispatches censored just as the G.I.s had their V-mail censored. Censoring mail and checking on telephone messages were routine for the U.S. military.
The Korean War was a little different….started in a confusing manner and then overnight became a United Nations police action, so censorship issues were confused. While the U.S. might have some control over reporters, other nations, like the Turks and French might be routinely passing on information for publication.
Due to the political fiction of Vietnam (struggling democratic nation seeking U.S. help against godless commies) there was no declaration of war, no UN mandate, just a slowly increasing U.S. military involvement in essentially a civil war……so there was no censorship. (President Johnson three times asked for studies on the possibility of censorship but never had the political clout to impose it.)
Faulkner’s dissertation is Bao Chi: The U.S. News Media in Vietnam 1960-1975 and is available online via the UMass Library.
As the U.S. involvement in South Vietnam grew, there was a parallel (and nearly man-for-man) increase in North Vietnamese strength in the southern part of Vietnam. The U.S. government decided to ignore the Geneva Accords calling for free elections on unification (and did this with political spin, saying “We cannot allow elections because the Communists would win – because we all know they cheat!”)
A lobbying group, The American Friends of Vietnam, Inc., mounted a major public relations campaign in the Fifties touting an unknown Catholic as “the George Washington of Asia” but when Ngo Dinh Diem was faltering in the predominantly Buddhist nation, the U.S. encouraged a coup against him in November 1963.
Lyndon Baines Johnson ran in 1964 as a “peace” candidate against Republican right-winger Barry Goldwater and Lt. Gen. Curtis “Bomb’em back to the Stone Age” Lemay. President Johnson won by a landslide in November….and the U.S. phase of the war escalated from 1965 to 1968.
Without censorship to control reporters and news reporting, the U.S. government resorted to the psychological engineering techniques of Madison Avenue and Capitol lobbyists. A central information office was set up in Saigon….known as JUSPAO for the Joint U.S. Public Affairs Office. These daily briefings for correspondents soon became known as the “Five O’Clock Follies” because the presented information often was frequently at such odds with what reporters witnessed in the field.
Reporters in Vietnam, even American reporters, were no longer “on-the-team” players. Many saw their role as arbiters of the truth with a loyalty to the troops and the families who worried about them back home. Journalistic ethics were on the side of straight – and often critical – reporting of the U.S. efforts or mess in Vietnam.
American news was still dominated by newspapers and wire services in the Sixties and Seventies. Television nightly news had been only 15 minutes a day until CBS expanded to a half hour in 1963. Television had made radio a dying local medium (which caused radio to seek young listeners of rock n’ roll).
Most larger communities had both morning and evening newspapers….the morning paper catered to conservative issues, WASP, pro-business, Republicans, right-wing leaning issues. The afternoon newspapers were read by the working class factory workers who were interested in union issues, ethnic groups, Catholic and Jewish news, Democrats and liberal issues.
Back to the “Five o’Clock Follies” in Saigon, which were held 12 hours ahead of East Coast time…..so 5 p.m. in Saigon was 5 a.m. in New York City….and the news correspondents from Vietnam were filing their reports critical of the U.S. mission. These reports went into the evening newspapers read by the families of the men being drafted for the war.
This meant the White House and Pentagon had the day to respond and mount a rebuttal in time for the evening television news and the next day’s morning newspapers.
This confusion in reported news….journalists on the scene vrs. generals and politicians in Washington led to what became known as “the Credibility Gap.”
After the Vietnam War, when the U.S. military was at its lowest ebb and confidence in politicians was nearly non-existent, a new sort of revised history myth emerged that “journalists had lost the war” and the “liberal press” had sunk the generals and the American people. The tactic was similar to the stab-in-the-back smear campaign of the Nazis against Jews in the Thirties.
The legacy of Vietnam was that most journalists no longer trusted the military or the government to report on foreign actions. And there was some evidence this was true as the U.S. entered into covert actions in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Chile, and in many places in Africa. Vietnam was such a set-back for the Pentagon that many overseas actions were done by proxy forces and there were cover stories to mask U.S. involvement.
Journalists who attempted to make sense of many of these actions were quickly labeled as commie pinko liberals while at the same time many readers and viewers no longer believed reports showing or quoting government spokespeople…..and there emerged another myth that the news media was fully controlled by government and was only a mouthpiece for propaganda.
During the Eighties there were a few actions, the killing of Marines in Lebanon, the refusal of the U.S. Navy to adapt Israeli Air Force tactics, and the loss of aircraft and Marines caused the U.S. to pull out of Lebanon. Shortly after, the U.S. invaded Grenada and caused another messy standoff with the press. Some journalists were even shot at and others held in custody.
The Department of Defense National Media Pool, a cranky child born of a loveless marriage, died after a long illness during the final quarter of 2001. It was fourteen.
The pool, a child of the Pentagon and the U.S. press, was conceived in the wake of the military's ham-fisted handling of reporters during its 1983 invasion of Grenada. It was an imperfect solution to a vexing problem: How to ensure independent press coverage of the nation's most sensitive military operations.
The pool came to life on July 19, 1987, when a band of ten reporters took off from Andrews Air Force Base for its first real-world deployment. Under strict secrecy, they flew to the Persian Gulf to witness the reflagging of Kuwaiti oil tankers with U.S. flags. They were on hand to document a first-class snafu when a mine blew a hole in the hull of the first tanker the U.S. military had pledged to protect.
The next biggie for the pool was another fiasco, the December 1989 invasion of Panama. Military did not inform the National Media Pool until 3 days after the operation started. Once called, the Pentagon held the media pool at an air base in Panama. Pentagon spoon-fed journalist photographs and information about the operation. Once on scene, the media pool was not allowed true access to information. Information reported to the American public was not accurate about what really happened during the operation.
Seven months later Kuwait was invaded by Iraqi forces and the build up to the Gulf War began. A good account of the news media/government interface is Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War by John R. McArthur. Reporters were angry at their treatment by the military, but there was a whole new twist to international reporting with CNN broadcasting 24-hours a day and having a tremendous appetite for news (or anything to go on the air). Network news and most newspapers were completely sidelined as the world (including Saddam Hussein) watched CNN.
The next decade brought along a new breed of military public affairs officers who had grown up during the hate the press/hate the military era. And a new concept was developed which harkened back to Vietnam days of reporters with field units….but this time the reporters were “embedded” and remained with the same unit – and as in “Band of Brothers” became submerged and bonded with the unit.
CNN is still out there with the big appetite for “news” but so are many international 24-hour news organizations.
But just as public affairs officers sort of “grew up” in the post-Vietnam era, so did the young officers and enlisted men who are serving today in the military. The old World War II notions of veterans in both the news media and the military, have faded away to a new generation.
Doubtful there will ever be the free-wheeling reporting of Vietnam (which is described well in Michael Herr’s classic, Dispatches) but the new reporting with satellite communications and around-the-clock news feeds is still seeking some sense of balance (at a time when newspapers and news magazines are fading away) in the Internet age.
The concept of a national press changes in Vietnam as the first “Television War.”
There are a number of good books on the history of war reporting…..The First Casualty by Philip Knightly (he also wrote The Second Oldest Profession about intelligence) and also many photo books (see especially the works of Matthew Brady and Timothy O’Sullivan) on how early news reporting of wars evolved.
For this seminar, the main points are the On-The-Team reporting of World War II where news correspondents wore military uniforms with an arched “Correspondent” tab similar to a Ranger or Airborne tab. These U.S. reporters saw themselves as part of the national war effort.
The concept of the “background briefing” also came out of World War II. General of the Army George C. Marshall held nearly weekly backgrounders for top editors and national reporters to field off-the-record questions and provide not-for-attribution or off-the-record answers on the war effort. Deals were made with reporters and news agencies by the U.S. government. When, for example, the New York Times learned of the atomic bomb, the Pentagon asked for no release of the information in exchange for a seat on the bomber dropping the first nuclear device.
During World War II, reporters had their dispatches censored just as the G.I.s had their V-mail censored. Censoring mail and checking on telephone messages were routine for the U.S. military.
The Korean War was a little different….started in a confusing manner and then overnight became a United Nations police action, so censorship issues were confused. While the U.S. might have some control over reporters, other nations, like the Turks and French might be routinely passing on information for publication.
Due to the political fiction of Vietnam (struggling democratic nation seeking U.S. help against godless commies) there was no declaration of war, no UN mandate, just a slowly increasing U.S. military involvement in essentially a civil war……so there was no censorship. (President Johnson three times asked for studies on the possibility of censorship but never had the political clout to impose it.)
Faulkner’s dissertation is Bao Chi: The U.S. News Media in Vietnam 1960-1975 and is available online via the UMass Library.
As the U.S. involvement in South Vietnam grew, there was a parallel (and nearly man-for-man) increase in North Vietnamese strength in the southern part of Vietnam. The U.S. government decided to ignore the Geneva Accords calling for free elections on unification (and did this with political spin, saying “We cannot allow elections because the Communists would win – because we all know they cheat!”)
A lobbying group, The American Friends of Vietnam, Inc., mounted a major public relations campaign in the Fifties touting an unknown Catholic as “the George Washington of Asia” but when Ngo Dinh Diem was faltering in the predominantly Buddhist nation, the U.S. encouraged a coup against him in November 1963.
Lyndon Baines Johnson ran in 1964 as a “peace” candidate against Republican right-winger Barry Goldwater and Lt. Gen. Curtis “Bomb’em back to the Stone Age” Lemay. President Johnson won by a landslide in November….and the U.S. phase of the war escalated from 1965 to 1968.
Without censorship to control reporters and news reporting, the U.S. government resorted to the psychological engineering techniques of Madison Avenue and Capitol lobbyists. A central information office was set up in Saigon….known as JUSPAO for the Joint U.S. Public Affairs Office. These daily briefings for correspondents soon became known as the “Five O’Clock Follies” because the presented information often was frequently at such odds with what reporters witnessed in the field.
Reporters in Vietnam, even American reporters, were no longer “on-the-team” players. Many saw their role as arbiters of the truth with a loyalty to the troops and the families who worried about them back home. Journalistic ethics were on the side of straight – and often critical – reporting of the U.S. efforts or mess in Vietnam.
American news was still dominated by newspapers and wire services in the Sixties and Seventies. Television nightly news had been only 15 minutes a day until CBS expanded to a half hour in 1963. Television had made radio a dying local medium (which caused radio to seek young listeners of rock n’ roll).
Most larger communities had both morning and evening newspapers….the morning paper catered to conservative issues, WASP, pro-business, Republicans, right-wing leaning issues. The afternoon newspapers were read by the working class factory workers who were interested in union issues, ethnic groups, Catholic and Jewish news, Democrats and liberal issues.
Back to the “Five o’Clock Follies” in Saigon, which were held 12 hours ahead of East Coast time…..so 5 p.m. in Saigon was 5 a.m. in New York City….and the news correspondents from Vietnam were filing their reports critical of the U.S. mission. These reports went into the evening newspapers read by the families of the men being drafted for the war.
This meant the White House and Pentagon had the day to respond and mount a rebuttal in time for the evening television news and the next day’s morning newspapers.
This confusion in reported news….journalists on the scene vrs. generals and politicians in Washington led to what became known as “the Credibility Gap.”
After the Vietnam War, when the U.S. military was at its lowest ebb and confidence in politicians was nearly non-existent, a new sort of revised history myth emerged that “journalists had lost the war” and the “liberal press” had sunk the generals and the American people. The tactic was similar to the stab-in-the-back smear campaign of the Nazis against Jews in the Thirties.
The legacy of Vietnam was that most journalists no longer trusted the military or the government to report on foreign actions. And there was some evidence this was true as the U.S. entered into covert actions in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Chile, and in many places in Africa. Vietnam was such a set-back for the Pentagon that many overseas actions were done by proxy forces and there were cover stories to mask U.S. involvement.
Journalists who attempted to make sense of many of these actions were quickly labeled as commie pinko liberals while at the same time many readers and viewers no longer believed reports showing or quoting government spokespeople…..and there emerged another myth that the news media was fully controlled by government and was only a mouthpiece for propaganda.
During the Eighties there were a few actions, the killing of Marines in Lebanon, the refusal of the U.S. Navy to adapt Israeli Air Force tactics, and the loss of aircraft and Marines caused the U.S. to pull out of Lebanon. Shortly after, the U.S. invaded Grenada and caused another messy standoff with the press. Some journalists were even shot at and others held in custody.
The Department of Defense National Media Pool, a cranky child born of a loveless marriage, died after a long illness during the final quarter of 2001. It was fourteen.
The pool, a child of the Pentagon and the U.S. press, was conceived in the wake of the military's ham-fisted handling of reporters during its 1983 invasion of Grenada. It was an imperfect solution to a vexing problem: How to ensure independent press coverage of the nation's most sensitive military operations.
The pool came to life on July 19, 1987, when a band of ten reporters took off from Andrews Air Force Base for its first real-world deployment. Under strict secrecy, they flew to the Persian Gulf to witness the reflagging of Kuwaiti oil tankers with U.S. flags. They were on hand to document a first-class snafu when a mine blew a hole in the hull of the first tanker the U.S. military had pledged to protect.
The next biggie for the pool was another fiasco, the December 1989 invasion of Panama. Military did not inform the National Media Pool until 3 days after the operation started. Once called, the Pentagon held the media pool at an air base in Panama. Pentagon spoon-fed journalist photographs and information about the operation. Once on scene, the media pool was not allowed true access to information. Information reported to the American public was not accurate about what really happened during the operation.
Seven months later Kuwait was invaded by Iraqi forces and the build up to the Gulf War began. A good account of the news media/government interface is Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War by John R. McArthur. Reporters were angry at their treatment by the military, but there was a whole new twist to international reporting with CNN broadcasting 24-hours a day and having a tremendous appetite for news (or anything to go on the air). Network news and most newspapers were completely sidelined as the world (including Saddam Hussein) watched CNN.
The next decade brought along a new breed of military public affairs officers who had grown up during the hate the press/hate the military era. And a new concept was developed which harkened back to Vietnam days of reporters with field units….but this time the reporters were “embedded” and remained with the same unit – and as in “Band of Brothers” became submerged and bonded with the unit.
CNN is still out there with the big appetite for “news” but so are many international 24-hour news organizations.
But just as public affairs officers sort of “grew up” in the post-Vietnam era, so did the young officers and enlisted men who are serving today in the military. The old World War II notions of veterans in both the news media and the military, have faded away to a new generation.
Doubtful there will ever be the free-wheeling reporting of Vietnam (which is described well in Michael Herr’s classic, Dispatches) but the new reporting with satellite communications and around-the-clock news feeds is still seeking some sense of balance (at a time when newspapers and news magazines are fading away) in the Internet age.
The generations of warfare described by most authors are:
Original warfare: Clans or tribes attacking in mobs to overwhelm an enemy.
1st Generation: tactics of line and column; which developed in the age of the smoothbore musket.
2nd Generation: tactics of linear fire and movement, with reliance on indirect fire.
3rd Generation: tactics of infiltration to bypass and collapse the enemy's combat forces rather than seeking to close with and destroy them; and defence in depth.
4th Generation: non-nation state groups organized to communicate well and attack a standing military force from within the safety of civilian surroundings.
5th Generation: rogue actors attacking targets (corporations, states, ethnic groups, etc.) without widespread support or organization.
You may find many other simple and complex definitions for these so-called "generations" of warfare, but I will try to make them simple. None of these are clear-cut definitions and each contains its own internal evolution. And all six types of warfare could be going on today.
ORIGINAL was the basic Hell's Angels approach to intimidation and "gimmie yer goodies" attacking of another group in competition for land, wealth, fishing rights, natural resources or slaves. Native American history serves as a good example....Algonquins being made to pay tribute to Mohawks etc. or the Apaches and the Ogala Sioux etc.
1st GENERATION -- Organized military units using formations (like the Sumarians of Iraq or much later the Romans) with specialized units (chariots, cavalry, bowmen, infantry) fighting in a manner more like a game of chess.The development of the smooth-bore musket and mortar (later cannon) brought this concept to the ultimate end.In general, wars were fought by soldiers and not the civilian population (yeah, cities were raped, pillaged, burned, and citizens massacred, but the usual target of this type of warfare was not the civilian population -- people needed slaves and fresh troops).
2nd GENERATION linear fire (meaning front lines) developed in the U.S. during the Civil War. The first battles were fought as 1st Generation but the tactics of the musket did not do well against rifle (not smooth bore) bullets. Cannon became more accurate and battle lines caused great casualties on both sides. This led to the tactics of the Great War when hundreds of miles of trenches across Europe were shelled and shot at for years, resulting in horrendous casualties on both sides. The introduction of the machine gun, tanks, aircraft, and chemical warfare, added to the meatgrinder aspect of this type of warfare where a nation could lose an entire generation of young men.During the Great War the Germans employed Zeppelins to drop bombs on English cities and extend the war to the other nation and used submarines to try to starve Britain.
3rd GENERATION was all about avoiding the frontline stalemate and using Blitzkreig etc. to punch through an enemy defense and bypass strong points to collapse the enemy by getting into rear areas. This saw the development of landing craft, paratroopers, long-range aircraft, and very few examples of frontline trench warfare. This was war by maneuver with great reliance on logistics to amass enough military power to strike one area and push toward the enemy rear.The U.S. bypassed Japanese occupied islands in the Pacific and made dozens of different landings or attacks on German and Japanese defenses.Startegic bombing of the enemy heartland was common and after striking military and infrastructure targets the aircraft were turned on civilians in cities. Submarines were used to attack supply ships to starve and freeze the enemy....coal and oil became targets.Vietnam came near the end of 3rd Generation warfare because there were two main enemy units (Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army) representing governments and fighting as irregular and regular troops.The battles were fought not for territory or riches but for control of the population.
4th Generation warfare is a different concept because one nation (the U.S. for example) is not fighting other nations (like Iraq and Afghanistan) but are battling an idea (religious or political etc.) of a clustering of people from different nations who blend into the civilian population.So there is no frontline, few military targets, and no real national boundries to define the battlefield. And the enemy will not build fortifications (to be destroyed) or gather in large units (to be attacked) and will probably win by not losing. Starvation will not work well if the real goal is population control.
In short, each generation of warfare developed because advancements in warfare, equipment and tactics, made the previous form obsolete.Celtic clans in Europe could not withstand the Roman legions, Gettysburg was a two-sided massacre because smooth-bore tactics were used against rifles and cannon, the Great War saw the loss of nearly a generation of British, French and German soldiers in a stalemated conflict, the nuclear powers of the Cold War caused protracted warfare in Korea, Vietnam, Angola, and many other nations.
So today we are looking at how a non-national group of people (Taliban or Hezbollah etc.) can battle against a well-organized and well-financed military establishment for the support of the people.If these modern wars really are about population control, then this should really be in the bailiwick of journalists....reporters who talk to people, soldiers, leaders, and historians....and can research the issues which will affect the outcome of these conflicts.Writing about big tanks, fast tanks, robot tanks, etc., is worthless when the new enemy will just move to the swamps and mountains. Sophisticated radars, sensors, drones, and heat-detecting equipment might never spot the woman in blue who plants the bomb in the theater. The money spent on air superiority seems a bit wasted against an enemy that does not even use kites.
This seminar is about reporting OSINT on this type of warfare (which includes the vulnerabilities on the home front) where the main targets are the people and not facilities.
Original warfare: Clans or tribes attacking in mobs to overwhelm an enemy.
1st Generation: tactics of line and column; which developed in the age of the smoothbore musket.
2nd Generation: tactics of linear fire and movement, with reliance on indirect fire.
3rd Generation: tactics of infiltration to bypass and collapse the enemy's combat forces rather than seeking to close with and destroy them; and defence in depth.
4th Generation: non-nation state groups organized to communicate well and attack a standing military force from within the safety of civilian surroundings.
5th Generation: rogue actors attacking targets (corporations, states, ethnic groups, etc.) without widespread support or organization.
You may find many other simple and complex definitions for these so-called "generations" of warfare, but I will try to make them simple. None of these are clear-cut definitions and each contains its own internal evolution. And all six types of warfare could be going on today.
ORIGINAL was the basic Hell's Angels approach to intimidation and "gimmie yer goodies" attacking of another group in competition for land, wealth, fishing rights, natural resources or slaves. Native American history serves as a good example....Algonquins being made to pay tribute to Mohawks etc. or the Apaches and the Ogala Sioux etc.
1st GENERATION -- Organized military units using formations (like the Sumarians of Iraq or much later the Romans) with specialized units (chariots, cavalry, bowmen, infantry) fighting in a manner more like a game of chess.The development of the smooth-bore musket and mortar (later cannon) brought this concept to the ultimate end.In general, wars were fought by soldiers and not the civilian population (yeah, cities were raped, pillaged, burned, and citizens massacred, but the usual target of this type of warfare was not the civilian population -- people needed slaves and fresh troops).
2nd GENERATION linear fire (meaning front lines) developed in the U.S. during the Civil War. The first battles were fought as 1st Generation but the tactics of the musket did not do well against rifle (not smooth bore) bullets. Cannon became more accurate and battle lines caused great casualties on both sides. This led to the tactics of the Great War when hundreds of miles of trenches across Europe were shelled and shot at for years, resulting in horrendous casualties on both sides. The introduction of the machine gun, tanks, aircraft, and chemical warfare, added to the meatgrinder aspect of this type of warfare where a nation could lose an entire generation of young men.During the Great War the Germans employed Zeppelins to drop bombs on English cities and extend the war to the other nation and used submarines to try to starve Britain.
3rd GENERATION was all about avoiding the frontline stalemate and using Blitzkreig etc. to punch through an enemy defense and bypass strong points to collapse the enemy by getting into rear areas. This saw the development of landing craft, paratroopers, long-range aircraft, and very few examples of frontline trench warfare. This was war by maneuver with great reliance on logistics to amass enough military power to strike one area and push toward the enemy rear.The U.S. bypassed Japanese occupied islands in the Pacific and made dozens of different landings or attacks on German and Japanese defenses.Startegic bombing of the enemy heartland was common and after striking military and infrastructure targets the aircraft were turned on civilians in cities. Submarines were used to attack supply ships to starve and freeze the enemy....coal and oil became targets.Vietnam came near the end of 3rd Generation warfare because there were two main enemy units (Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army) representing governments and fighting as irregular and regular troops.The battles were fought not for territory or riches but for control of the population.
4th Generation warfare is a different concept because one nation (the U.S. for example) is not fighting other nations (like Iraq and Afghanistan) but are battling an idea (religious or political etc.) of a clustering of people from different nations who blend into the civilian population.So there is no frontline, few military targets, and no real national boundries to define the battlefield. And the enemy will not build fortifications (to be destroyed) or gather in large units (to be attacked) and will probably win by not losing. Starvation will not work well if the real goal is population control.
In short, each generation of warfare developed because advancements in warfare, equipment and tactics, made the previous form obsolete.Celtic clans in Europe could not withstand the Roman legions, Gettysburg was a two-sided massacre because smooth-bore tactics were used against rifles and cannon, the Great War saw the loss of nearly a generation of British, French and German soldiers in a stalemated conflict, the nuclear powers of the Cold War caused protracted warfare in Korea, Vietnam, Angola, and many other nations.
So today we are looking at how a non-national group of people (Taliban or Hezbollah etc.) can battle against a well-organized and well-financed military establishment for the support of the people.If these modern wars really are about population control, then this should really be in the bailiwick of journalists....reporters who talk to people, soldiers, leaders, and historians....and can research the issues which will affect the outcome of these conflicts.Writing about big tanks, fast tanks, robot tanks, etc., is worthless when the new enemy will just move to the swamps and mountains. Sophisticated radars, sensors, drones, and heat-detecting equipment might never spot the woman in blue who plants the bomb in the theater. The money spent on air superiority seems a bit wasted against an enemy that does not even use kites.
This seminar is about reporting OSINT on this type of warfare (which includes the vulnerabilities on the home front) where the main targets are the people and not facilities.
19 June 2009
Who was Ian Fleming...and who were the bad guys?
Ian Lancaster Fleming (28 May 1908 – 12 August 1964) was an English author and journalist. Fleming is best remembered for creating the character of James Bond and chronicling his adventures in twelve novels and nine short stories.
Fleming was born into an upper-class land-owning English family. I think the Wikipedia entry on Fleming is as good as any other source for our purposes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Fleming
So… he came from the upper class….his entry position was at the top level (aide to the head of Naval intelligence…and he was a planner for a specialized commando unit……and he was a journalist – covering spy trials and events in Moscow.
Many of the incidents in his first James Bond novel, Casino Royale (1953), come from actual events Fleming knew about due to his intelligence work. His second work, Live and Let Die (1954) again has the Soviets up against the Free World, but financing intelligence operations with gold sales and voodoo. The following year he published
Moonraker, about a wealthy industrialist wanting to destroy London.
In his 1956 novel, Diamonds are Forever, Fleming uses the illegal diamond trade in Africa to fund activities. By this time, Fleming has set up a system where despite the Cold War between the Soviets and NATO, the Russian characters are always involved in business means of funding operations.
Unlike other Cold War novelists, Fleming applied other devious means of fundraising in gold, diamonds, oil, etc. (Later in this seminar we will look at coltam in Africa) Perhaps these tales of fundraising schemes might have been interesting enough on their own without the backdrop of the tension between sides in the Cold War.
While other writers just faced off Yank/Brit agents with Soviet agents each funded by their respective governments, Fleming went the extra step of tossing out a semi-plausible possibility that some actions could be self-funded outside of government coffers.
But his big leap came later, when Fleming separated the action agents from the Soviet Union and allowed people to consider rogue agents just working for themselves.
When Thunderball came out in 1961, Fleming took another leap forward with the introduction of SPECTRE – the Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion – or a non-nation-based terrorist organization. So instead of the Soviet Union being behind all things bad, Fleming opened up the possibility that some non-nation players might enter the game.
But what the hell, this is just fiction……Right?
So, about 50 years ago, Ian Fleming set about exploring wild and sexy dramatic ways
for James Bond to battle in exotic places with industrialists, financiers, scientists and others who were not merely employees of an opposing government, but individuals in a way like Osama bin Laden who backed an idea and found the means to fund their terrorist movement.
In general, greed was the motivator for the enemies of James Bond, but in the real world other ideas, like fundamentalist religion, are powerful motivators for people to revolt against governments.
I like to mention Ian Fleming because of Chapter 11 in the 9/11 Commission Report about the lack of imagination shown by the U.S. in assessing the post-Cold War threat from rogue insurgent groups like Al Qaeda.
Back in 2001, the idea that Muslim rebels could find the funding and work together to train dedicated volunteers to hijack aircraft to fly into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and possibly the Capitol or White House, did seem to be the work of a novelist like Ian Fleming. That men could come into the U.S., attend flight training schools (no take-offs or landings, please), research aircraft schedules and airports, and then commandeer four aircraft nearly simultaneously and fly to population centers of business and government -- while the U.S. military sought guidance on defensive measures and the top leadership was in disarray and powerless to stop them – does seem like something out of a James Bond novel.
And the introduction of the suicide bomber as the poor man’s nuclear weapon….or that bypassing stockpiles of enemy munitions could mean most U.S. casualties in Iraq are from IEDs…..and the list goes on of very different people in a very different challenge to the U.S. and Europe and China.
Another journalist to consider is former newspaper and Associated Press reporter Thomas Harris. In 1975, he wrote his first novel, Black Sunday, about a diabolical plot to kill thousands with a blimp during the Superbowl.
Perhaps ahead of his time, the terrorism of 11 September, 2001, led to many stadiums being turned into no-fly zones due to fears of a similar attack. The novel was turned into a film – “Black Sunday” (1977) -- a very short two years after being published. Following its success, Harris devoted his career entirely to fiction and in 1981, wrote his first book in the Hannibal Lecter trilogy.
Journalists seem to be especially clever at adapting real life situations to international incidents. The daily interaction of reporters with criminals, cops, soldiers, politicians, and publicans seems to often give journalists a more realistic look at the ways that some dedicated individuals could challenge national governments. People with a military or intelligence background often lack this base-level tutoring from constant journalistic encounters with people at the top and bottom of society.
Governments often lack imagination -- especially when looking at potential enemies and the actions of people who do not have large forces or a tremendous treasury but do possess dedication.
Fleming was born into an upper-class land-owning English family. I think the Wikipedia entry on Fleming is as good as any other source for our purposes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Fleming
So… he came from the upper class….his entry position was at the top level (aide to the head of Naval intelligence…and he was a planner for a specialized commando unit……and he was a journalist – covering spy trials and events in Moscow.
Many of the incidents in his first James Bond novel, Casino Royale (1953), come from actual events Fleming knew about due to his intelligence work. His second work, Live and Let Die (1954) again has the Soviets up against the Free World, but financing intelligence operations with gold sales and voodoo. The following year he published
Moonraker, about a wealthy industrialist wanting to destroy London.
In his 1956 novel, Diamonds are Forever, Fleming uses the illegal diamond trade in Africa to fund activities. By this time, Fleming has set up a system where despite the Cold War between the Soviets and NATO, the Russian characters are always involved in business means of funding operations.
Unlike other Cold War novelists, Fleming applied other devious means of fundraising in gold, diamonds, oil, etc. (Later in this seminar we will look at coltam in Africa) Perhaps these tales of fundraising schemes might have been interesting enough on their own without the backdrop of the tension between sides in the Cold War.
While other writers just faced off Yank/Brit agents with Soviet agents each funded by their respective governments, Fleming went the extra step of tossing out a semi-plausible possibility that some actions could be self-funded outside of government coffers.
But his big leap came later, when Fleming separated the action agents from the Soviet Union and allowed people to consider rogue agents just working for themselves.
When Thunderball came out in 1961, Fleming took another leap forward with the introduction of SPECTRE – the Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion – or a non-nation-based terrorist organization. So instead of the Soviet Union being behind all things bad, Fleming opened up the possibility that some non-nation players might enter the game.
But what the hell, this is just fiction……Right?
So, about 50 years ago, Ian Fleming set about exploring wild and sexy dramatic ways
for James Bond to battle in exotic places with industrialists, financiers, scientists and others who were not merely employees of an opposing government, but individuals in a way like Osama bin Laden who backed an idea and found the means to fund their terrorist movement.
In general, greed was the motivator for the enemies of James Bond, but in the real world other ideas, like fundamentalist religion, are powerful motivators for people to revolt against governments.
I like to mention Ian Fleming because of Chapter 11 in the 9/11 Commission Report about the lack of imagination shown by the U.S. in assessing the post-Cold War threat from rogue insurgent groups like Al Qaeda.
Back in 2001, the idea that Muslim rebels could find the funding and work together to train dedicated volunteers to hijack aircraft to fly into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and possibly the Capitol or White House, did seem to be the work of a novelist like Ian Fleming. That men could come into the U.S., attend flight training schools (no take-offs or landings, please), research aircraft schedules and airports, and then commandeer four aircraft nearly simultaneously and fly to population centers of business and government -- while the U.S. military sought guidance on defensive measures and the top leadership was in disarray and powerless to stop them – does seem like something out of a James Bond novel.
And the introduction of the suicide bomber as the poor man’s nuclear weapon….or that bypassing stockpiles of enemy munitions could mean most U.S. casualties in Iraq are from IEDs…..and the list goes on of very different people in a very different challenge to the U.S. and Europe and China.
Another journalist to consider is former newspaper and Associated Press reporter Thomas Harris. In 1975, he wrote his first novel, Black Sunday, about a diabolical plot to kill thousands with a blimp during the Superbowl.
Perhaps ahead of his time, the terrorism of 11 September, 2001, led to many stadiums being turned into no-fly zones due to fears of a similar attack. The novel was turned into a film – “Black Sunday” (1977) -- a very short two years after being published. Following its success, Harris devoted his career entirely to fiction and in 1981, wrote his first book in the Hannibal Lecter trilogy.
Journalists seem to be especially clever at adapting real life situations to international incidents. The daily interaction of reporters with criminals, cops, soldiers, politicians, and publicans seems to often give journalists a more realistic look at the ways that some dedicated individuals could challenge national governments. People with a military or intelligence background often lack this base-level tutoring from constant journalistic encounters with people at the top and bottom of society.
Governments often lack imagination -- especially when looking at potential enemies and the actions of people who do not have large forces or a tremendous treasury but do possess dedication.
Journalism in an Age of Terror
This is the companion blog to JOURN 391G Seminar: Journalism in an Age of Terror, a three-credit on-line course at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
