Thursday, 07 February 2008

OPEN SOURCE COUNTER-INSURGENCY?

What’s left (as an option for the US in Iraq)? It’s possible, as Microsoft has found, that there is no good monopolistic solution to a mature open-source effort. In that case, the United States might be better off adopting IBM’s embrace of open source. This solution would require renouncing the state’s monopoly on violence by using (Shiite and Kurdish) militias as a counterinsurgency.

John Robb, October 2005, in a New York Times Op-Ed. (if you add Sunni militias to the mix, a gross oversight on my part but implied in the approach, it is spot-on analysis).

The Sunni Tribal Awakening (rather than "the surge") has radically slowed violence in Iraq by bringing it back to the levels of activity seen in 2005. That’s a good thing, but the Awakening has been wrongly attributed to a new (resurrected) counter-insurgency doctrine (COIN). Here’s why. The main objective of United States COIN doctrine is to enhance/extend the sovereignty and legitimacy of the host nation. Everything that is done is slaved to this top level goal. Unfortunately, the development of legitimacy is a long and slow process that takes decades of effort (if it can be accomplished at all). In contrast, everything about the Tribal Awakening is diametrically opposed to this. It arms and trains militias and groups that aren’t loyal to the host nation and thereby diminishes the host nation’s legitimacy by undercutting its monopoly on violence and its control over sovereign territory.

What did happen with the Awakening, and the speed of the transition should be a clue to this, is that the US military opportunistically embraced the insurgency (in a move akin to IBMs embrace of open source development in the 90’s). This embrace showered autonomy, weapons, money ($300 per month x 60,000 participants), protection (from Shiite militias and the Iraqi government), and training on insurgent groups. By doing so, it replaced the ISI (Islamic State of Iraq, an al Qaeda affiliate) as the leading participant in the insurgency. The only "cost" to these insurgent groups, which were under extreme pressure from Shiite militias due to overreaching by the ISI, was to sacrifice the ISI. They rapidly complied.

Where this goes from here is problematic since (and I say this to get you thinking and not to shock you) the US is now leading both the insurgency and the counter-insurgency in Iraq.

I’ve spent way too much time in the GWOT to believe those numbers are an actual reflection of support for militant jihad. The VAST majority of the "jihadists" I have met and interrogated were not particularly religious–no more so than the average non-radical muslim–but they were politically disenfranchised. In the dictatorships of the Middle East, there is no viable political resistance. The Mubareks and Assads and Husseins (to bring in Richard’s conjecture about Saddam’s Salafi problem) simply won’t allow political opposition to grow. Which leaves religion as the only outlet for the frustrated poor and powerless. Scratch a jihadist and you’ll find a garden-variety revolutionary. So I don’t believe for a second that those big, scary hoardes of Muslim soldiers marching off to war.

I especially don’t see the logic of thinking that Putin, Ahmedinejad and Chavez are going to join forces to wage war against China. Did I misunderstand what you were saying?

To get to what I think was your main point, I never said that high-tech listening devices aren’t crucial to the national security. I merely said that increased spending on technology solutions drove the mission in ways that were counterproductive to the HUMINT mission. So enamored was our intel service of their technology, in fact, that we had <i>nobody</i> on the ground feeding us information from Saddam’s Iraq. That’s my conjecture as to how the CIA lost the ability to tell good interrogation methods from bad: they were too busy playing with their expensive toys to remember how to do the more stone-age stuff.

The development speed that the insurgency had from the year 2003 to mid 2005 is an interesting one. Just how could relatively untrained, and seemingly disconnected groups of fighters be able to actually take on the only superpower left in an organized way.

I spoke with a Sunni fighter (cell leader) that we captured in late December 2005 who had been wearing a blast belt and who claimed that he had actually been recruited by an IIS officer into a Salafi movement in late 1996 in Amarra. They had prayed regularly (no hint of jihad) until the US arrived and then their conversations before and after prayer turned to jihad. The IIS officer had been based in Amarra and then with the US arrival he disappears to Baghdad but maintains close ties to the cell leader and still comes on occassions after 2003 to pray in Amarra. Then he calls in mid 2005 to see if the cell leader was ready to conduct jihad– the cell leader immediately answers the call and is into the fight after a two week indoctrination period with 30 others in Baghdad.

I would suggest that in fact Saddam and the IIS knew of and had a serious internal Salafi movement problem that we knew nothing about prior to 2003–probably a spin off of the Muslim Brotherhood movement in Iraq. I would further suggest that the very same IIS officers who were tasked to watch the Salafi movement are the same ones who later setup the various insurgent groups and were the driving force behind the various groups thus shortening the lead time needed to launch an organized full blown insurgency.

The US military in Iraq spends way to much time focused on al Qaida and not the Islamic Army of Iraq (IAI) which has historically spun off six different Sunni insurgent groups and was in fact founded by former IIS officers and Iraqi Army officers.

Couple the existence of well organized small groups that had learned to survive in the underground being hunted by the IIs to the concept of "open source warfare" then the critical mass is reached far faster than ever thought possible in the realm of unconventional warfare.

If you are interersted in the concept of "open source warfare" as the key in the evoluntionary speed of the Iraqi insurgency here is an interesting link run by John robb who has written the Brave New War.

http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/

If you’re asking why the insurgency is so popular or has so many adherents, I’d venture to guess that’s because they don’t want an outside country, especially us, running their country for them.

If you’re asking how they got so powerful so fast, I’d cite the general speeding-up of change in the world and increased access to newer, deadlier technologies. Nothing takes as long as it used to, it seems.

I’m curious what your simple answer is; this was just me trying to guess.

Please send along your articles — seannelson, gmail, you know where to put the periods and funny symbols. We’ll continue this discussion elsewhere.

If Mao is the theorist behind the three phase insurgency concept-just how did we go from a phase one in 2003 to a full blown phase three in mid 2005 when Mao himself envisioned the phase three itself taking upwards of 10-15 years to develop?

The answer is actually simple it is just that we still today are not willing to see the answer.

It goes to the heart of how the insurgency is able to evolve their TTPs so fast.

Just finished up my book Drinkiing Tea in Iraq-War of Perception and have finished the Sprial Questioning Article for CALL with one to follow on Tactical Questioning. Will send you the electronic copies if you are interested—it summarizaes alot of what we had spoken about over the last few years.

Have a number of articles in the pipeline concerning the global Salafi movement and the global jihad coming out in the next few months on a global security site that has a large number of influencers.

Stay safe—-

I didn’t know that the Army had abandoned rapport in favor of letting the ISF do it from now on, but that doesn’t surprise me. The military is really good at taking the easy way out when what is required isn’t technology but competence. I doubt they’ll ever teach spiral questioning–given the acumen of most of the instructors at Ft. H I’ve known, I don’t think there’s enough institutional knowledge to make it doctrine.

Of course one of the major roadblocks to ensuring that the Army is well-versed in 4G warfare is the fact that they’re just not as picky about recruiting as they used to be, nor are they as picky about who gets into certain career fields. So just when what we need is smarter soldiers, we’re dumbing down the force. This is true everywhere, but the situation in HUMINT is more dire, because we’ve always needed the interrogators to be smarter than the average bear.

I agree withn you about the additional troops thing, but I wonder how much of the decline in violence wasn’t due to the ethnic cleansing actually having worked? Any way you slice it, mass slaughter eventually results in something calmer than what was there before. Maybe we just hung around while they finished. It’s a grisly thought, but worth pondering. (No idea where it is online, but a historical comparison of the ethnic/sectarian map of Baghdad supports this theory.)

As for Diyala, yes, it’s important, and yes, QJBR hangs their hat there, but that’s because they’re not hanging their hat in Fallujah, Ramadi or Al Qaim anymore. I submit that the battle has always been over Baghdad, and that the Shia have won. Which is not to say that the Sunni will just roll over, but the Iraqi state is in the hands of the Shia. (We gave it to them, incidentally, but that’s not quite germane here.) The fact that QJBR is operating much more in Diyala than they were (I covered Diyala and Salahadin at the Div level back in 2004-early 2005) just means that they don’t get to operate in Baghdad as much as they would like. Focusing too closely on QJBR ignores the Shia elephant in the room, which is exactly what we did for the first 3 or so years of this war.

I’m in Fallujah, but I travel a lot and I’m only working tangentially with HUMINT these days. I plan to leave the military contracting biz for good in a month–grad school in ME Studies is calling.

Key though was their shift to company level operations—the theoritical debate had been lead by a retired USMC LTC Michael Poole with his books on Battle Tactics of the Cresent Moon–or the theories put forth by another USMC retired LTC on 4G warfare. The theoritical debate has taken most of their rotations in Iraq to get correct—but they rotate every 7 months not 12 or now 15 months on the USA side so maybe it is easier to discuss and decide if one is not gone for a total of 39 months out of 56.