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.