The Ugly Truth: Insurgencies are Brutal

Dayuhani ---still owe you the insurgent definition but it will not be the definition taken from the FM---this below is along the lines of what I will send you:

This was written in August 2004--it is I am afraid far closer to the truth now as it was then if we go back and reanalyze the Sunni insurgency if we say compare it to the IAI journal written by the founder of the IAI from the period of 2003 thru early 2005 before it was uncovered from a cache near Abu Ghraib and only partially translated journal is an eye-opener and goes a long way in answering the question of 'how was it possible for the Sunni insurgent groups to go from as a Mao phase one guerrilla war to a full blown phase three in under three years---we have never wanted to clearly address that evolution and the drivers of that evolution--we are asking the very same questions now in Afghanistan--it was a quietened Taliban up through 2006 and then they exploded out of the chute in 2007---what was the evolution that drove that sudden expansion and what were the drivers---even SWJ is avoiding that discussion.

Che's theory lives on
Iraq's insurgency is a variant of Che's foco insurgency in that it operates without a need for popular support. However, the environment today differs in many important ways that provide it with the opportunity of success. Here's why Iraq's insurgency has gained traction:

•Multiplexed loyalties. Iraq is riven by ethinic, tribal, political, and religious loyalties. This provides numerous fault lines for guerrillas to exploit.

•An occupation. The US occupation serves as a focal point for guerrilla activity. The elimination of the Baathist military sufficiently weakened the state in ways that made it easy for a foco insurgency to gain momentum.

•Modern networks. Iraq has a modern (although dilapidated) infrastructure that is ripe for attack. This infrastructure is critical for its economic recovery and is in stark contrast to the sparse networks of developing nations ~40 years ago. Additionally, a diverse set of global media networks allow guerrillas to circumvent state controls on information to amplify fault lines.

The Bazaar vs. the Foco
A series of tactical innovations allows global guerrillas to both survive and thrive in Iraq. These innovations (cumulatively called the bazaar) allow it to survive state counter-pressure, learn/advance, and deplete the ruling government of funds/authority/legitimacy. In contrast, the foco was unable to accomplish this. Also, unlike the foco, the end point of the bazaar isn't a new state but the destruction of the state. Here's how global guerrillas have improved on the model:

•A diverse set of small groups with different motivations. These groups don't have a center of mass (hierarchy) that can be targeted. Their small size provides them excellent OPSEC and the collapse any subset of groups doesn't disrupt the whole. Strength through diversity.

•A bazaar of violence. This bazaar provides a clearinghouse of money, information, and other resources necessary for rapid group learning and improvement. This complex system enables small groups to exceed the rate of improvement of centralized organizations.

•Leverage from markets and networks. These networks provide Iraq's guerrillas rates of return far in excess of those expected for groups of their size.

What this means
A vibrant bazaar insurgency in Iraq will set the stage for the following events:

•Iraq's bazaar will outlast the US occupation. The choice for the US will be to either continue to write a blank check for Iraq and run up deficits or withdraw. It is only a matter of time before the decision to withdraw is made.

•Organic Islamic order. The goal of this insurgency is very much in line with Che's vision (an organic order that arises out of state weakness). However, in Iraq, the complete disruption of state power isn't replaced with another state but rather organic Islamic order -- the Fallujah and Taliban model.

Remember the US military power did not quieten down Fallujah-AQI turned off the Sunni population and that was the downfall for AQI.

Dayuhan---getting off track but a response is as follows;

1. the goal of an insurgency is sometimes not that of the overthrow of the government but it sometimes attempts to neutralize the government influence in areas that it deems necessary ie do the narco groups in Mexico want the total failure of the Mexican government or really just less federal power along the border, did the Islamic Army of Iraq really want power again or were they attempting to influence the Sunni population using the argument of resistance to the invaders, were the Shiite groups fighting to represent Iran or were they settling old religious scores from 1400 years ago ---insurgent groups always have a number of competing goals at the same time

2. That competition was not really insurgency until a government emerged that was recognized as a constituted government by Iraqis - recognition by the US or other external players would of course be irrelevant.

Would argue that the IAI whcih started it's IED campaign against US forces in late 2003 early 2004 was already structured into an insurgency structure aimed at the throwing out of the US as there was no Iraqi government in 2003/2004. This goes as well for the other strong 2003/2004 Sunni group Ansar al Sunnah.

I would personally argue that based on the number of Saddam Intelligence Service officers involved in tracking and eliminating any form of Sunni Salafi activity prior to the arrival of the US --Saddam definitely had a very quiet internal insurgency going on that we were simply not aware of. Kind of like taking the lid off of a cobra basket and having no flute.

Just my opinion.

Cow Cookie---couple that research together with Kilcullens's "conflict ecosystem" and you would have a deepened insight into the evolution of the insurgency especially the IED fight that currently this following comment seems to indicate we are losing rather badly against.

Just a side note--not even the Human Terrain System with it's new budget of 170M (up from a startup of 40M) has not been able to contribute anything of value to the demise of the IED networks so why do we have them in the game? With a 400% increase in cost have we gained 400% in effectiveness?

Monday, 09 August 2010
JOURNAL: Open Source Warfare and IED Design Innovation
Insurgencies that utilize open source warfare are almost always extremely innovative (see earlier posts on the topic). As a result, big conventional militaries find it very difficult to keep up even when they spend tens of billions and hire thousands of consultants (while, unfortunately, studiously avoiding a study of the method of warfare that creates this innovation gap). With this in mind, here's a new article in Wired magazine on the innovation rates seen in IEDs, and how these innovations are spreading globally as new groups adopt this form of warfare. Here are some choice quotes:

"I can take $600, go into a bazaar, and make a device," says one senior Jieddo officer. "And I can tie up $1.2 billion to $2 billion of US money by doing it."

This escalating arms race, pitting kitchen-table bombsmiths against US government technologists, began in the early months of the Iraqi insurgency. The first IEDs were often simple radio-controlled bombs, made from two or three 155-millimeter artillery shells set off by a signal from a cheap household gadget, like a key fob car alarm switch or a wireless doorbell buzzer. US troops, traveling in unarmored Humvees, were defenseless against them until each of the services hastily bought hundreds of radio-frequency jammers -- with codenames like Cottonwood, Ironwood, MICE, ICE, Warlock Red, Warlock Green, Jukebox, and Symphony -- capable of generating an invisible hemisphere of electromagnetic energy that could drown out those trigger signals. Eventually, Jieddo would oversee the deployment of more than 40,000 jammers in Iraq.
The bombers quickly learned how to circumvent the electronic countermeasures. They used handheld radio-frequency meters and bombs with dummy trial-and-error firing circuits to figure out what part of the spectrum the jammers blotted out and how big the jamming field was. Then they simply switched to new remote controls that used bandwidths beyond the jammers range. When US technicians introduced electronic countermeasures to jam low-power radio-control devices like garage door openers and car alarms, insurgents moved to high-power devices, including two-way radios and extended-range cordless phones. Then they moved on to mobile phones in every local cell network, from 1G to 3G. While this race had been run before, it had never taken place at such speed.
At the beginning of this year, US forces in Iraq reported a new version of the passive infrared trigger, nicknamed the Black Cat. It looked exactly like a regular passive infrared sensor, but the motion detector was altered to be triggered instead by radio frequencies. Shielded to prevent it from being set off by household radios and with reduced reception range, the new device is one of the most devious yet. Designed to detect the passing bubble of a coalition jamming systems powerful radio field, the Black Cat has brought Jieddo full circle: It is an IED that will detonate only when it detects an IED countermeasure.
Late one afternoon in April, Llamas shows me the latest device theyve been working on, just in from Afghanistan. A neatly made plywood box about 8 inches high and 5 inches square, it has a length of replica detonation cord emerging from the base. Llamas pulls the box open, revealing a layer of soft foam and a wooden plunger attached to the lid. When stepped on or driven over, he says, the foam is compressed and the tip of the plunger, which is saturated with a chemical, descends into a chamber at the bottom of the box. That chamber contains a second substance, and when the two chemicals mix, a pyrotechnic reaction ignites the end of the detonation cord, which leads to an explosive charge. The box is the logical conclusion of years of reverse evolution in insurgent weapons technology. Without a power source, a blasting cap, or a single piece of wire or metal contact, it has no electromagnetic or metallic signature. Linked to a charge mixed up from odorless homemade explosives, packed beneath a dirt road, it would be all but impossible to detect: a Flintstones land mine. "Its a block of wood, basically," Llamas says.

Dayuhan;

One example of survival of the fittest as the main driver of an insurgency---Tamil Tigers---do not think for a moment the movement is dead-it is just in survival mode as they never calculated that the government would destory the population in order to drive them into non existence. The governement formulated what I see as the first test of the theory of total non-population centric COIN---would be interesting to watch how the Tigers recover long term.

We could go into the former Algerian insurgency which was really going nowhere and were basically in a survival mode as well--then with a rebranding effort focusing on AQ they exploded back on the stage and are in fact now giving the counterinsurgent ie the government a run for their money.

So yes there are times in the development of an insurgency that the long term goal is just to hang in and survive and I would also venture a guess that a number of insurgencies really do not want the government to totally fail and end up as a "failed state" as it forces them into nation building.

Will get you a definition of insurgency that applies to both non violent as well as violent actors.

Dayuhan;

1. the study covered 15 current insurgencies and were based on open source reporting-a total of 54K data sets were used--initial Afghanistan review was indicating as well the same characteristics
2.successful insurgenicies could be defined as those insurgencies that still exist as the goal as an insurgent group is not to be destroyed by the counterinsurgent
3. tend to disagree with you on the Iraqi Sunni inusrgency comment as they defintively were even in the intial and middle stages were an insurgency based on throwing out the US and then later taking on the Shiia during the ethnic cleansing phase---they might have appeared to be filling a governance void but they definitely were structured to resist from their view the US occupation from day one.

Sunni insurgencies excluding AQI who had a different agenda all together from the other groups.

Even the Mahdi Army and the other Shiia insurgent groups began copying their Sunni counterparts in the TTP areas as they stepped up their attacks on the US.

Dayuhan---what if they were in fact a common set of characteristics to be found in all of the last insurgencies?

From our analysis and modeling we find that there are 15 key characteristics that define a successful insurgent ecosystem; these are listed below with a short name to describe the feature.
1. Many body: There are many more autonomous insurgent groups operating within conflicts than we had previously thought. For example, there were 100+ autonomous groups operating in Iraq (as of 2006).
2. Fluidity: The insurgents are loosely grouped together to form fluid networks with short half-lives. This is very different from the rigid hierarchical networks that have been proposed for insurgent groups.
3. Redundancy: If we remove the strongest group from the system another group will rise to replace the previous strongest group
4. Splinter: When a group is broken it does not generally split in half but instead shatters into multiple pieces
5. Redistribute: When a group is broken the components are redistributed amongst the other groups in the system. The redistribution is biased towards the most successful remaining groups.
6. Snowball: The strongest groups grow fastest
7. Tall poppy: The strongest groups are the predominant targets for opposition forces
8. Internal competition: There is direct competition amongst insurgent groups for both resources and media exposure. They are competing with each other in addition to fighting the stronger counterinsurgent forces.
9. Independent co-ordination: Autonomous groups act in a coordinated fashion as a result of the competition that exists between them.
10. Emergent structure: Attacks in both Iraq and Colombia become 'less random and more coordinated over time
11. Evolution: The strategies employed by the groups evolve over time where successful groups/strategies survive and unsuccessful strategies/groups are replaced.
12. High dimensional: Connection occurs over high dimensions (i.e. Internet, cell phone etc) and is not dominated by geographic connections.
13. Non-linear: It is approximately 316* times harder to kill 100 people in an attack than it is to kill 10 people. (*Results for a conflict with alpha=2.5).
14. Independent clones: the fundamental structure and dynamics of insurgent groups is largely independent of religious, political, ideological or geographic differences.
15. Stigmergy communications: is a mechanism of spontaneous, indirect coordination between agents or actions, where the trace left in the environment by an action stimulates the performance of a subsequent action, by the same or a different agent. Stigmergy is a form of self-organization. It produces complex, apparently intelligent structures, without need for any planning, control, or even communication between the agents. As such it supports efficient collaboration between extremely simple agents, who lack any memory, intelligence or even awareness of each other.

Could the most common cause of insurgencies -- brutal or otherwise -- be:

a. When certain segments of a population become threatened with -- or actually lose -- rights, privileges, status, prestige, wealth, property, livelihood, etc.,

b. Under some new governmental and/or societal arrangements,

c. With such violations often being pursued and justified by such reasons as "modernization," "universal values," "modernization," "human progress," etc.,

d. Possible examples being: (1) Southerners in the 1860s United States, (2) samurai in latter 19th Century Japan and, today, (3) various individuals, populations, groups and nations -- due to the demands of present-day globalization, its proponents and its bodyguards?

In order to preclude "brutal insurgencies" in instances such as those presented at "d" above, how might government (1) meet/have met its "societal transformation" goals without (2) infringing the rights, privileges, property, status, prestige, wealth, livelihood, etc., of those concerned?

Now that everyone agrees with the statement---can we finally get to the point of understanding just why these insurgencies are breaking out---this includes the narco side as well?

Can we finally ditch the failed concept of human terrain as it is an inherent part of any intelligence preparation of the battlefiled and does not require six figure social scientists to tell us what it is, Can we finally understand that all insurgencies and this includes the narco side in fact have ecosystems that for some strange reason no one really wants to cleanly address, Can we finally have a frank and honest debate about "open source warfare" as the driver behind the ever increasing number of insurgenices, Can we admit that in fact what we are seeing in the growing number of insurgencies is in fact 5GW with "open source warfare" as the driver and we are not prepared for it, Can we finally admit to ourselves that in fact the current COIN as being practiced is not what some have written/discussed in 2004 and 2005 and it does require being brutal and while COIN is all about being pop centric we cannot always protect the population.

NOTE: How else can one explain the evolution process of an insurgency which takes a 600 dollar investment and drives a US response of over 2B in US counter costs--one of the most potent examples of "open source warfare" in a long time just recently quoted in a Wired article.

What amazes me is that any older SF vet will tell you that the insurgencies of the 60s/70s were brutal, and have always been brutal--we need to analyze just why the general public/politicans think otherwise and why does it take someone now to tell us what we knew in 1971?

Have we as a society simply forgotten how to learn from the past or to question the past as it sure does appear that we have forgotten how to simply think.

Absolutely correct.

Amen.