UK CT & COIN Features - 14 May 2008

A round-up of today’s newspaper articles covering the UK’s involvement in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations at home and abroad.

US Government Shoots Self in Foot, Again

Crossposted from Kings of War; IRG members take note of the update at the bottom. Kimmage is giving a talk next week in the War Studies Department.

Abu Aardvark: resource tradeoffs and the war on ideas

Via Marc Lynch at the link above I note that the US government because of ‘budgetary shortfalls’ is forced to fire analysts in Radio Free Europe/Free Liberty. Those receiving pink slips are apparently to include RFE/RL analysts Daniel Kimmage and Kathleen Ridolfo authors of important reports on Iraqi insurgent use of media The War of Images and Ideas and Al Qaeda’s use of the Internet The Virtual Network Behind the Global Message.

I really don’t get this administration. Actually I do get something: six years into the GWOT they still haven’t got a clue about the nature of the war they are in. It’s not just the ignorance which galls its the studied, committed blindness and warped priorities which they exhibit. RFE/RL’s annual budget is $79 million. By comparison that kind of money would buy you about one half of a single F-22–pilot and fuel not included. Says Aardvark:

That’s right: the US government is cutting loose one of its best analysts of al-Qaeda’s use of the internet in order to save money which doesn’t even amount to a rounding error in the Pentagons budget.

Update: Is it a sign of the apocalypse that Jon Stewart on The Daily Show perfectly encapsulates this administration in two pithy words? ‘Seldom outdumbed.’

Another update: For some reason I completely forgot that Daniel Kimmage is coming to give a talk here in the war studies department next week. These are the details:

Al-Qaeda and the Media:The Virtual Network behind the Message

In a world where media messages travel the world instantly, groups like Al-Qaeda have used the internet to great success in spreading their message of global Jihad and recruiting new followers to its cause. How does Al Qaeda craft its media image and how does it use the internet to deliver its message globally?

The International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR) invites you to a talk by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Senior Analyst Daniel Kimmage, author of the recently published study The

Al-Qaeda Media Nexus, to discuss the links between media branding, web technology, and jihadist organizations.

Date: Wednesday, 21 May 2008

Place: War Studies Meeting Room (6th floor), Strand Campus, King’s College London

Time: 4-5pm

Seating is limited. If you wish to attend, you need to register. Please RSVP to mail@icsr.info before 20 May.

Secretary Gates’ Speech at Colorado Springs

Crossposted from Kings of War

MEMO TO: Whoever forms the next Presidential Administration, please keep Secretary Gates in post

The Secretary of Defense just made a strong speech on a hot topic. Here’s a snip but you should read the whole thing:

There is a good deal of debate and discussion – within the military, the Congress, and elsewhere – about whether we are putting too much emphasis on current demands – in particular, Iraq. And whether this emphasis is creating too much risk in other areas, such as:

• Preparing for potential future conflicts;
• Being able to handle a contingency elsewhere in the world; and
• Over stressing the ground forces, in particular the Army.

Much of what we are talking about is a matter of balancing risk: today’s demands versus tomorrow’s contingencies; irregular and asymmetric threats versus conventional threats. As the world’s remaining superpower, we have to be able to dissuade, deter, and, if necessary, respond to challenges across the spectrum.

Nonetheless, I have noticed too much of a tendency towards what might be called “Next-War-itis” – the propensity of much of the defense establishment to be in favor of what might be needed in a future conflict. This inclination is understandable, given the dominant role the Cold War had in shaping America’s peacetime military, where the United States constantly strove to either keep up with or get ahead of another superpower adversary.

And, certainly, one cannot predict the future with any certainty. Soon after 1900, Winston Churchill said that he could not foresee any “collision of interests” with Germany. In the 1920s, as the Chancellor of the Exchequer, he said that there wasn’t the “slightest chance” of war with Japan in his lifetime. Today, rising and resurgent powers with new wealth and ambition are pursuing military modernization programs. They must be watched closely and hedged against.

But in a world of finite knowledge and limited resources, where we have to make choices and set priorities, it makes sense to lean toward the most likely and lethal scenarios for our military. And it is hard to conceive of any country confronting the United States directly in conventional terms – ship to ship, fighter to fighter, tank to tank – for some time to come. The record of the past quarter century is clear: the Soviets in Afghanistan, the Israelis in Lebanon, the United States in Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Smaller, irregular forces – insurgents, guerrillas, terrorists – will find ways, as they always have, to frustrate and neutralize the advantages of larger, regular militaries. And even nation-states will try to exploit our perceived vulnerabilities in an asymmetric way, rather than play to our inherent strengths.

Overall, the kinds of capabilities we will most likely need in the years ahead will often resemble the kinds of capabilities we need today.

On National Public Radio there’s a good piece on the debatet that Gates is talking about: Army Focus on Counterinsurgency Debated Within

My two cents (heavily informed by a correspondent who observes Beltway politics from a closer perspective than me):

What is the future conventional threat? Not Russia and not China either for a long while yet but low-level skirmishes in which a COIN-focussed military would be a useful thing.

What is the current imperative? In a nutshell: not losing the wars we are actually in right now.

Is there really a conflict of interests between major warfighting and COIN? Possibly, but less than meets the eye. A COIN-adapted force is one with a high level of basic skills in which low-level leaders are tested for flexibility, initiative and the ability to adapt. These are good things. Anyway, we know now that the old orthodoxy is wrong. It’s harder to go from warfighter to COIN-operator (should you care to make that distinction) than it is to go the other way.

Is there a risk of overdoing COIN? In my view, not really. The real problem is overstretch of the forces. That’s what’s killing the Army and Marine Corps.

That said, call me cynical, but the real, real problem is that a COIN-focussed force really doesn’t offer a great deal of opportunity for the truly gargantuan defence contracts we’ve gotten used to over the years. It’s about the mindsets and skillsets of the force much more than it is weapons suites and materiel.

UK CT & COIN Features - 13 May 2008

A round-up of today’s newspaper articles covering the UK’s involvement in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations at home and abroad.

Owning ‘the Means of Communication’ in Insurgency

Relevant to the recent discussion here on this site regarding the propaganda of the deed in contemporary insurgency is a post by Brigitte Nacos over at the CTLab site. Nacos, who has written extensively on terrorism and the media, cites the recent engagement in Lebanon to illustrate the value for insurgents today in owning ‘the means of communication’, as well as having a deed-driven message to communicate.

Once upon a time, Karl Marx assigned power to those who own the means of production. Today it’s safe to say that power is in the hands of those who either own the means of communication or otherwise manage to communicate their messages directly to their target publics. Governments and influential interest groups have always understood this, and so have terrorists. This point was once again driven home in the latest clash between the Lebanese government and its backers and Hezbollah, the terrorist organization that has actually grown into a mighty guerilla and de facto ruling force. While Hezbollah’s own al-Manar television and radio networks carried the threats and hard-line rhetoric of Hezbollah’s leader Sheik Nassan Nasrallah, the organization’s fighters silenced the Sunni majority party by taking its television station off the air and setting its newspaper offices on fire.

Read the whole post here.

UK CT & COIN Features - 12 May 2008

A round-up of today’s newspaper articles covering the UK’s involvement in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations at home and abroad.

The Pakistan Security Research Unit

Thanks to the reader who provided the link to The Pakistan Security Research Unit (PSRU), it looks a useful resource for anyone with an interest in the area, or in militant Islamism.

“The Pakistan Security Research Unit (PSRU) was established in the Department of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford, UK, in March 2007. It serves as an independent portal and neutral platform for interdisciplinary research on all aspects of Pakistani security, dealing with Pakistan’s impact on regional and global security, internal security issues within Pakistan, and the interplay of the two. PSRU provides information about, and critical analysis of, Pakistani security with particular emphasis on extremism/terrorism, nuclear weapons issues, and the internal stability and cohesion of the state.”

Many of the papers available looked interesting, including:

The Jihadi Terrain in Pakistan: An Introduction to the Sunni Jihadi Groups in Pakistan and Kashmir [PDF]

Insurrection in Pakistan’s Tribal Areas [PDF]

Attacks on Uzbek Militants in South Waziristan: Issues and Implications of an Internal Jihad [PDF]

UK CT & COIN Features - 8 May 2008

A round-up of today’s newspaper articles covering the UK’s involvement in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations at home and abroad.

UK CT & COIN Features - 7 May 2008

A round-up of today’s newspaper articles covering the UK’s involvement in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations at home and abroad.

Blogger’s Roundtable on DOD’s Minerva Consortium

Roundtable discussion with Dr Thomas Mahnken, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy Planning

Thanks to Matt Armstrong at Mountain Runner who recommended me I just took part in a DoD bloggers roundtable (linked to above) on the Minerva Consortia which Secretary Gates recently announced. If you’re an academic interested in defence and security research this is a big thing. The gist of it is excerpted below (read the whole thing here The Minerva Consortia):

America today faces more, and more complex, challenges than at any time in its recent past. From the rise of new powers to trends in the environment, demographics, and culture to violent extremism, we will increasingly grapple with unprecedented change. To address these shared challenges, Americans, and their government, need a better understanding of the factors and causes behind them, what they mean, and what the future might bring. We in the Department of Defense propose a new initiative to help develop that understanding: government-supported research consortia that will draw upon the knowledge, ideas, and creativity of the nation’s universities. The Minerva Consortia will provide important and lasting professional contributions to a variety of disciplines, and a critical public service.

Concept

Minerva’s core approach is to encourage the formation of diverse consortia to conduct original research in a range of topic areas. Each topic or question will be framed and approached in a fashion appropriate to it and from a range of perspectives. We seek teams of scholars across universities and colleges who will tackle a question or topic across disciplines, coordinated by a lead institution. Participants need not be U.S. citizens.

…

Initial Topic Areas and Products

1. Chinese Military and Technology...

2. Studies of the Strategic Impact of Religious and Cultural Changes within The Islamic World…

3. Iraqi Perspectives Project...

4. Studies of Terrorist Organization and Ideologies…

5. Exploratory Areas for Research…

Some observations:

• The call is not exclusive to US institutions and scholars which is excellent because chances are that the problems which vex the DoD also vex their allies; that being the case,
• compelling insights and possible solutions may be found abroad; so,
• good for the DoD to recognize this with an international approach.

I was caught offguard by having the first question on the Roundtable. I managed to say ‘gee, good idea, we’ll send you a proposal’ which wasn’t a question as such, but an important point nonetheless. The fellow from Blackfive had a good question, I thought, about the gap between the military and academia (epitomized of late by the brouhaha over anthropologists and the Army’s human terrain system which we’ve written about here at KOW). The importance of getting the military into civilian educational settings was noted. This is another issue which is of much interest to me (see Pedagogy for the Long War). I was glad that he brought it up because I think this is a two-way street. Yes, the army needs to go Beyond the Cloister, as Petraeus put it; but universities need to think more creatively about how they can educate ‘beyond the cloister’ too. Our on-line Masters degree MA War in the Modern World is an example of how that can be done, so I was happy to get a plug in for that in the discussion. The British Army education branch has quite a good motto for our times: ‘train for certainty, educate for uncertainty.’ I think it expresses pretty much Gates’ message and intent with the Minerva programme. I welcome the initiative.

Sharon Weinberger at Wired’s Danger Room was less impressed: Pentagon’s Academic Outreach, Big Talk Little Cash Fair points, actually. The amount of money being stumped up is not huge–it is no Manhattan Project. It’s the defence department’s money being coughed up whereas arguably it should be coming from other agencies. And the appetite of universities for cash is so large (higher education is not cheap to operate, particularly to staff) that a few million is not going to go terribly far. All I’d say is a/ it’s a start, b/ other departments should be doing this, the DoD should be commended for actually doing it, and c/ if the funding is carefully targeted on issues which are otherwise extremely difficult to get funding councils to support then it could make a useful impact.

On the last point, it occurs to me that the initial topic areas are broad and what’s missing is, in my view, the biggest problem we now face: an understanding of how to conduct influence/information operations and propaganda in the 21st century. That’s the issue that is most pressing and it exists at every level of war from the grand strategic to the section level tactical. It applies ‘over there’ as well as at home. It’s a bit frustrating since Gates and Rumsfeld before him have both expressed the same frustration and incredulity about the situation they find themselves in:

Robert Gates: …public relations was invented in the United States, yet we are miserable at communicating to the rest of the world what we are about as a society and a culture, about freedom and democracy, about our policies and our goals. It is just plain embarrassing that al-Qaeda is better at communicating its message on the internet than America.

Donald Rumsfeld: Our enemies have skillfully adapted to fighting wars in today’s media age, but for the most part we, our country, our government, has not adapted. Consider that the violent extremists have established media relations committees—these are terrorists and they have media relations committees that meet and talk about strategy, not with bullets but with words. They’ve proven to be highly successful at manipulating the opinion elites of the world. They plan and design their headline-grabbing attacks using every means of communication to intimidate and break the collective will of free people.

The US and the UK have been fought to a standstill in two theatres by global jihadists not because they’re better at moving metal than we are but because they’re better at the purposeful shaping of the ideas and beliefs of others to warlike effect. That’s the cutting edge for insurgency research.