Friday, May 18, 2007
Brooks on the "wot"
The war on terror has shredded the reputation of the Bush administration. It’s destroyed the reputation of Tony Blair’s government in Britain, Ehud Olmert’s government in Israel and Nuri al-Maliki’s government in Iraq. And here’s a prediction: It will destroy future American administrations, and future Israeli, European and world governments as well.
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The Insurgent Advantage
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: May 18, 2007
The war on terror has shredded the reputation of the Bush administration. It’s destroyed the reputation of Tony Blair’s government in Britain, Ehud Olmert’s government in Israel and Nuri al-Maliki’s government in Iraq. And here’s a prediction: It will destroy future American administrations, and future Israeli, European and world governments as well.
That’s because setbacks in the war on terror don’t only flow from the mistakes of individual leaders and generals. They’re structural. Thanks to a series of organizational technological innovations, guerrilla insurgencies are increasingly able to take on and defeat nation-states.
Over the past few years, John Robb has been dissecting the behavior of these groups on his blog, Global Guerrillas. Robb is a graduate of the Air Force Academy and Yale University, and he has worked both as a special ops counterterrorism officer and as a successful software executive.
In other words, he’s had personal experience both with modern warfare and the sort of information management that is the key to winning it. He’s collected his thoughts in a fast, thought-sparking book, “Brave New War” that, astonishingly, has received only one print review — distributed by U.P.I. — in the month since it’s been published.
Robb observes that today’s extremist organizations are not like the P.L.O. under Yasir Arafat. They’re not liberation armies. Instead, modern terror groups are open-source, decentralized conglomerations of small, quasi-independent groups.
There are between 70 and 100 groups that make up the Iraqi insurgency, and they are organized, Robb says, like a bazaar. It’s pointless to decapitate the head of the insurgency or disrupt its command structure, because the insurgency doesn’t have these things. Instead, it is a swarm of disparate companies that share information, learn from each other’s experiments and respond quickly to environmental signals.
For example, the U.S. has spent billions trying to disrupt attacks from improvised explosive devices, but the I.E.D. manufacturing stream has transmogrified and now includes sophisticated metallurgy, outsourcing and fast innovation cycles. The number of I.E.D. attacks has remained pretty constant throughout the war.
Superempowered global guerrillas — whether it’s Al Qaeda, Iraqi insurgents, Nigerian oil fighters or the Brazilian gang P.C.C. — specialize in what Robb calls systems disruption. They attack the networks that support modern life. In one case, Iraqi insurgents spent roughly $2,000 to blow up an oil pipeline in Southeast Iraq. It cost the Iraqi government $500 million in lost revenue. For the insurgents, that was a return on investment of 25 million percent.
The 9/11 attacks, the Madrid bombings, the Niger Delta oil well attacks and even the Samarra mosque bombing were all attempts to disrupt the economic and social systems of target nations.
But, Robb continues, these new groups are not seeking to take over their countries the way 20th-century guerrillas did. They have a prenational, feudal mind-set to go along with their postnational Silicon Valley-style organizational methods. They merely seek to weaken states, so they can prosper in the lawless space created by collapse of law and order. That way the groups don’t have to construct anything or assume responsibility for anything.
In fact they’ve learned, as Lawrence of Arabia learned decades ago, that it’s better to weaken target governments, but not actually destroy them. When nations don’t feel existentially threatened, they don’t mobilize all their resources to defeat their foes. They try to fight wars on the cheap, and end up in a feckless semibelligerent state somewhere between real war and nonwar.
Robb is pessimistic (excessively so) that top-heavy, pork-driven institutions like the Defense Department or the Department of Homeland Security can ever keep up with open-source insurgencies. Since 9/11, he believes, big government institutions have engaged in a process of hindsight re-engineering designed to reduce future risk, when in fact, the very nature of the threat is that it’s random and cannot be anticipated.
He thinks democratic nations need to build their own decentralized counterinsurgency networks, though he goes over the top in imagining local squads of grass-roots terror fighters.
But time and again, he hints at the core issue, which is that nation-states are inefficient learning organizations, at least compared to their feudal and postnational foes. If the Iraqi insurgents defeat the U.S. then every bad guy on earth will study and learn their techniques. The people now running for president will find themselves in bigger heaps of trouble than the current one now is — trouble that this presidential campaign hasn’t even dealt with.
Pretty good analysis -- this guy Robb is sharp, and Brooks conveys his point well. Of course, the Frenchy-Lefty Pavlovia reflex is to simply surrender (or, at best, hide the head up the ass).
When nations don’t feel existentially threatened, they don’t mobilize all their resources to defeat their foes. They try to fight wars on the cheap, and end up in a feckless semibelligerent state somewhere between real war and nonwar.
Precisely -- that's what, eg, France did in 1939-1940, with predictable results. I say, let's forget about la drole de guerre, and fight a outrance, instead. And, the only practical way to do that is to bring in the fly boys. No way we can win this war just with thye Keystone Kops and a bunch of Leathernecks driving around in humvees. We need some serious firepower.
I say, let's forget about la drole de guerre, and fight a outrance, instead
yeah, why not? as long as you're not the one being shot at, that's a really easy stance to take.
Taking that idea one step further, it is amazing how little has been asked of your compatriots over this "wot": y'all are happy to have "support the troops" bumper stickers to constitute the full extent of your contribution to the war effort. Patriots like you are a dime a dozen, ai.
Dime a dozen, perhaps -- but still a patriot, not an out-an-out enemy of the US and Western Civ, which you'll find a dime a dozen among the pinko-lefties.
"I say, let's forget about la drole de guerre, and fight a outrance, instead
yeah, why not? as long as you're not the one being shot at, that's a really easy stance to take".
The men in the field are constantly complaining about NOT being allowed to fight as they would wish, such naysayers very much including you, so what then is your point??
AA: Don't try to find a point whithin such incoherence -- there is none, but the usual blind hatred of America of your random gauchiste. Boring.
so what then is your point??
simply that y'all are paying lip service to being supportive of your military, and will do so as long as it is at no cost.
Why do you think this is a no cost thing, Pepe? Don't we pay taxes? What did people do in WWII? Did everyone go over and rid France of Germans or was that just a lip service thing, too?
You want the draft, Pepe? Then sign up.
"simply that y'all are paying lip service to being supportive of your military, and will do so as long as it is at no cost."
You think it is lip service? Interesting how your private enthusiasms shape your poses.
You really think that right now there is no cost? Did it ever crawl across that cesspool between your ears that there is a far worse cost to losing against IM than that which comes from fighting it? Or is your "lip service" to tell us that you are comfortable on your knees?
Why do you think this is a no cost thing, Pepe? Don't we pay taxes?
Not as a result of the war - there has been no incremental cost.
What did people do in WWII?
There was considerable participation from the civilian population to the war effort in the form of taxes, rationing, collection of materials, volunteering. In contrast, we are all sitting this one out and even under these ideal conditions, the support, which is essentially philosophical, is crumbling. Between those that oppose the war and those that support it as long as it doesn't involve them in any material way, I can't imagine how this can continue for very long.
A draft would be interesting: there'd likely be massive unrest which would precipitate a conclusion.
piss off, aa.
piss off, aa.
The ne plus ultra of Pepean argumentation. Hey, PP, you're still mired in kindergaten-level logic and discourse. It's hard to graduate to 5th grade level, but with some effort (maybe eat lots of spinach, as Popeye the sailor recommends?), you may do it, perhaps.
Do you mean that having "typical pinko rhetoric" as sole line of argumentation constitutes logic discourse?
The ne plus ultra of Pepean argumentation
how else do you respond to rhetoric that requires ad hominems to bolster itself ?
True, offering one argument, even one, with honestly state premisses, valid deduction, and hefty supporting evidence is far beyond Versailles' wit. But from that Golden place they sure can piss liquid pyrite
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