Fresh from the department of news that you already know if you’ve read some of the latest posts on this blog, Thomas Rid has joined us on KOW. We are delighted to have him because he’s smart as a whip and doing some of the most interesting and useful work on COIN and matters military out there. Don’t believe me? Read his book written with Marc Hecker War 2.0.
Welcome, Thomas!
The IDF did it on the Philadelphi Route when clearing tunnel entrances. Hezbollah did it in Southern Lebanon on ambushes. Now the French police are doing it in Seine-Saint-Denis, a rough suburb of Paris: equipping forward-deployed units with mini-cameras.
Mobile phones with digital cameras have become ubiquitous. Not only in far-away combat zones, but also in trouble spots at home. Until now, those at the receiving end of law-enforcement had the pictures and they had YouTube. So the police are often on the receiving end of the imagery. That sometimes makes the cops look as if they have something to hide. The minicams are meant to end this impasse.
The French-made ear-borne gadgets are smaller than 5cm, weigh less than 100g, have an angle of 45°, last for 3h, cost a little less than €1,000, and start filming at the push of a button. Le Figaro has a picture of one.
“This equipment allows us to establish the context of our interventions,” said Christian Charlot, a police captain in the suburb. “It allows us to support our procedures but also to deter these people from acting in the first place, because when they know they are filmed, hostile groups are less aggressive.” Apparently police officers were skeptical at first, but now even ask for the gadgets.
Such measures will not become standard routine, most likely. Yet they might be useful at times. Clearly Taliban wouldn’t be deterred by cameras. But how often are tactics like this used in Afghanistan? What are the experiences? For the purposes of the IDF in the Gaza, it apparently worked well. But of course it comes with its own risks.
4,000 US Marines have their D-Day in Helmand today, in the words of Dutch Major-General Mart de Kruif. Meanwhile in Germany the big question is: is it war or not?
“Krieg” is a heavy word in German. It still triggers painful memories of bombed-out cities and the noise of air-raid sirens. So the government officially is not at war. But on June 23 three Bundeswehr soldiers were killed in a shootout with the Taliban. To their comrades and families, these days awfully felt like war. The funeral was today in Bad Salzungen, a small town in Thuringia. Franz Josef Jung, the minister of defence, attended the ceremony. In his view, calling the “stabilisation mission” a war would play into the Taliban’s hands, who would like to spin the operation as a “holy war,” he said. It’s a fighting mission, a Kampfeinsatz, not war. General Harald Kujat, a former chief of staff, disagrees: not calling a war a war would force the Bundeswehr to limit the use of heavy weapons. Artillery mightily sounds like war, of course.
Officials and officers in Germany equally shun counter-insurgency, which would be Aufstandsbekämpfung. COIN, of course, is too focused on military force, as seen from most quarters in Berlin. Instead the name of the game is “networked security,” which is about as precise as the ubiquitous comprehensive approach. The effect of this semantic fog of war, to quote an older German, is confusion. What, for instance, is the difference between “networked security” and counter-insurgency? “Please don’t push me to elaborate on that vague idea,” one member of parliament shot back when I asked that question recently.
Well, here’s an impressive idea on how to put “networked security” into practice.
More good BBC viewing – last week’s Panorama, The Battle of Swat Valley, has great access to the valley, and to the Pakistani army’s efforts to retake it.
One major caveat: the director’s fixation with Apocalypse Now – all those helicopters and rotating ceiling fans. This delivers a highly entertaining sequence with John Sweeney posing in his hotel room a la Martin Sheen. Sadly, he doesn’t punch the mirror – but at least he’s not wearing only his underpants. Other than inducing this nightmarish vision, it’s a great watch.
Marc Sageman is in London tonight and at late notice will be speaking at KCL in the War Studies Department tonight. See notice below:
The Change Institute and the The King’s College London Insurgency Research Group
Present
In conversation with Dr Marc Sageman
Radicalisation, Social Networks and the ‘Blob-o-sphere’: New approaches to counter-terrorism
Location: War Studies Seminar Room (K6.07), 6th floor, Strand campus
Time: 18.30- 20.30
Influence is all the rage: persuading key audiences that your ideas are right is seen by many as the key to success in our fight with militant Islamists of various stripes.
Surely it should be easy enough to obtain influence through our ‘strategic communications‘ with the Muslim world. After all, we’ve got a good story to tell – our values deliver prosperity and individual freedoms. What we need to do, clearly, is make sure our messages to Muslims are factual, truthful and consistent (these days its easy to get caught in a lie). Naturally, the messages should reflect our values: we want the audience to know what they’re missing out with all this takfiri repression. And telling the story should be easy – we’ve got the best minds in advertising, marketing, media and design.
What could possibly go wrong?
Somehow, it turns out that this well-meaning model of influence hasn’t been all that effective. Many of the studies on strategic communications put this down to bureaucracy – we need more money, different organizational structures, better minds – the ‘best and brightest’, even. A good survey is this recent RAND report [pdf]. Others suggest that it’s the result of our foreign policies – the best communications strategies in the world are just lipsticking the pig. Perhaps President Obama’s more sophisticated approach will sweeten the pill of western values. A third group suggest that the problem is our vague, incoherent message – in contrast to the allegedly simple, coherent line put out by the enemy: we don’t have a clear narrative, they do. I’m not persuaded, either that ‘their’ story is simple or coherent, or even that having a simple consistent story is the elixir.
I think there’s more to it. Why won’t they believe us? This Defense Science Board study has a stab at an answer [pdf]:
To be effective, strategic communicators must understand attitudes and cultures, [and] respect the importance of ideas. [...] To be persuasive, they must be credible.
Credibility. How to get that, if telling the truth doesn’t cut it? I’m writing a paper about this at the moment, so won’t spill all the beans. But as a tease – it turns out that theories of cognitive and constructionist psychology can tell us a great deal about how people receive and process incoming information. This offers some good clues as to why factual messages about attractive values have little traction with target audiences and, into the bargain, provides some insights on how to better achieve credibility and influence.
Oddly, this huge body of rigorous psychological literature doesn’t feature all that much in the recent strategic communication and influence work. Theorists of COIN, wars amongst the people, and so on have drawn in part on marketing and advertising, which – to some extent, of course – rest on psychology and sociology. This earlier RAND study is a fine example of that, and makes many good points. And yet the literature is on the whole maddeningly vague, beyond the commonplace thought that these wars are about ideas and persuasion.
So then, from cognitive psychology, we have theories of dissonance, bias, judgmental heuristics, analogical reasoning. And from constructionism, concepts of identity, mythology and memory. Communities are, to some degree, imagined by their members. The thrust of all this is that people are not passive recipients of information, that their identities are to some extent constructed, and therefore unfixed, but that these beliefs – once acquired – are stubborn to shift, even in the face of ostensibly plausible new information.
Frank Kitson once wrote that:
It is in men’s minds that wars of subversion have to be fought and decided.
That sounds right. But Kitson left it there, concluding ruefully that the area was
so hedged around with imponderables that no useful purpose would be served by further speculation in this context. Perhaps some qualified person will take the matter up later on, and research it in a scientific way.
Can we help him – and can you help me? Where are the psychologists who will do for COIN what David Kilcullen has done from an anthropological perspective? Any reading suggestions greatly appreciated, as always.
Here’s one from me: If you’re interested in the state of the art, Matt Armstrong has the best blog around on strategic communications.
Andrew Krepinevicvh in the latest Foreign Affairs has a paper on ‘The Pentagon’s Wasting Assets: Eroding Foundations of American Power‘. I’m afraid it’s password protected so if you’re not a subscriber or haven’t access through your university you can just read the summary and an excerpt at the link. It’s really quite an impressive overview–’a bit technocentric, not surprisingly from CSBA’, as the friend who pointed out the article to me says, but nonetheless clear-headed and showing strategic insight.
The first point that caught my eye relates to my question of a few days back about insurgents and ATGMs:
The growing range of RAMMs available to irregular forces is not the only, or even the deadliest, problem. The U.S. military has long enjoyed a near monopoly on the use of guided, or ”smart,” munitions, which offer the enormous benefit of high accuracy independent of a weapon’s range. But now guided RAMMs (or “G-RAMMs”) are proliferating from powers such as China and Russia. Once these are in the hands of irregular forces, those forces will be able to hit targets with great precision and reliability. Moreover, such weapons do not require a high degree of operator training. As a harbinger, during the Second Lebanon War, Hezbollah irregulars hit an Israeli warship with an Iranian-made guided ASCM and destroyed or disabled over 50 Israeli tanks with sophisticated Russian-made guided antitank missiles. The ability of irregular forces to precisely hit critical points, such as airfields, harbor facilities, and logistics depots, will pose serious problems for the U.S. military’s way of operating.
There is a good discussion going on under that post about why insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan are not using such things. My view, at the moment, is that they aren’t because no states–yet–have thought it a good idea to provide them with the hardware. Why that is the case is another interesting question. Bottomline, however, is that highly capable and well armed irregulars are going to provide a main challenge. Overall, I think the piece really reinforces the premise of the hybrid wars concept that ‘asymmetric’ techniques will not just appeal to irregulars but that states too will (already do, I reckon) see this as the most effective way way to contest Western power:
Several events in recent years have demonstrated that traditional means and methods of projecting power and accessing the global commons are growing increasingly obsolete — becoming “wasting assets,” in the language of defense strategists. The diffusion of advanced military technologies, combined with the continued rise of new powers, such as China, and hostile states, such as Iran, will make it progressively more expensive in blood and treasure — perhaps prohibitively expensive — for U.S. forces to carry out their missions in areas of vital interest, including East Asia and the Persian Gulf. Military forces that do deploy successfully will find it increasingly difficult to defend what they have been sent to protect.
As Krepinevich notes, we actually ‘knew’ this in 2002 when Marine Gen Paul Van Riper playing the Red Team in a war-game exercise modelling an attack on Iran successfully foiled a large US conventional attack, sinking or badly damaging a large part of the naval forces in the Persian Gulf but then managed to convince ourselves otherwise. That suspension of disbelief is getting a lot harder to maintain. The implications are large. What with aircraft carriers, short-range attack aircraft, low-orbit and potentially high-orbit satellites, all looking increasingly vulnerable and also irrelevant to the main sources of threat it would seem that we have invested an enormous amount in a few very expensive bits of kit. I like the way Gen Mattis encapsulates this, arguing that American forces risk being ‘dominant but irrelevant’ though Krepinevich seems to be suggesting the situation is even worse–neither dominant or relevant.
Krepinevich’s paper is really about the US but the question is even more crucial to be asked here in the UK where the down arrows in the defence budget will be as sharp or sharper and from a lower base. The UK military desperately needs an overhaul based upon a clearheaded assessment of our real strategic needs. As Anthony Cormack and I wrote in our paper ‘Iraq, Afghanistan and British Strategy‘ in Orbis a couple of months ago:
The British government has not emasculated its defense establishment to the degree that has occurred on the Continent. Nevertheless, while the Labour government has shown a willingness to deploy the armed forces as an instrument of policy (however ill-defined), it has not shown an equal willingness to pay for the privilege. Where it has shown a willingness to spend, money has generally been put into big ticket items that will prop up the United Kingdom’s defence industrial base, which tends to be precisely the sort of spending that is of least use in the current climate. This was the case during the economic boom years and now there is no money left in the till. Defence spending is a zero-sum game and the situation is complicated by inter-service rivalry, as General Dannatt has recognized (speaking at RUSI in June 2008):
‘This is a joint and increasingly inter-agency activity and I would welcome the widening of what has been a largely Army debate to include the role that all environments can have in these most demanding and likely of operations. As I have said, I am sure that we will end up with some down arrows in our existing resource requirement in the Army, and I am ready for that debate right across Defence, where I expect to see other down arrows. Overall, we must recognise that we are unlikely to have enough to do all that we would like – we must now look seriously at what we really, really need.’
The incoming Chief of the General Staff, General Sir David Richards, has been making the same point and, in my view, suggesting the right course forward–see ‘Big Guns Don’t Win Today’s Battles‘ in the Telegraph from a couple of days ago commenting on his RUSI 2009 Land Warfare speech:
It is becoming clear that there is simply not enough money available to fulfil the separate aspirations of all three Services. To paraphrase Gen Sir David Richards, who spoke at the Royal United Services Institute on Wednesday, we can do many things inadequately or a few things well, but to try both will end in failure.
…
What Gen Richards is suggesting is that the military be put on a new footing to fight the wars in front of it and not those of yesterday. Old-fashioned wars between countries are unlikely; the future is about counter-insurgency battles, of the kind being fought in Afghanistan, with the Army taking the lead and the RAF and Royal Navy providing support. It is the “horse and tank moment” of the Thirties: whether to stick with the old or forge ahead with the new (Hitler, unlike Britain, went with the tank and bulldozed through Europe).
In the Guardian there are additional reports of concern about the state of the armed forces and its future development. From ‘Are we Getting Ready for the Wong War?‘:
Kearns [author of an Institute for Public Policy Research report on National Security in the 21st Century to be published on 30 June] said he was struck by how much spending was dictated by fierce inter-service rivalry and not long-term strategic thinking: “They get into a position of saying, ‘Well, if the air force is getting a Typhoon then it’s the navy’s turn next’, so they go for the aircraft carriers … There is a case for knocking heads together.” Professor Paul Cornish, head of the international security programme at the Chatham House thinktank, argues such rivalries have also weakened the MoD’s ability to plead its case inside government. “You can see the Treasury chiefs thinking, ‘They can’t decide anything because they are all at each other’s throats, so let’s decide ourselves’.” Yet the debate, he argues, should be “at the level of ideas and not at the level of the invoice”.
Amen to that, I say. There are hard choices ahead for the UK armed forces. To my mind, there are things that we really need–like a large ground force, supported by air and naval assets able to sustain operations in an era of persistent irregular conflict and better ability to shape the information environment–and things that which are merely nice to have. The nice-to-haves are, by and large, hugely expensive. I hope whoever wields the inevitable budgetary axe understands that there are no sacred cows.
If I were asked in a court of law whether this article in the LA Times by Robert Lennon ‘The Truth About Writers‘ was an accurate characterization of my life too I would plead the Fifth Amendment.
I’ve a question for KOW readers. Why do you think insurgents in Iraq and Aghanistan have not used advanced ATGMs or shoulder-launched SAMs against us? Logically, it seems to me either:
1. they can’t get them on the open market and no state yet wants to provide them; or,
2. they could, but don’t for some reason.
The first seems more likely but no doubt it is a complex story. Anyway, perhaps it’s a stupid question but it intrigues me. What do the rest of you think?
Anyone who gets the chance to hear Thomas Rid should take it. I was lucky enough to hear him yesterday, talking about the book he has written with Marc Hecker, War 2.0.
Rid is delightfully non-dogmatic, avoiding the extremes of antiquarianism (insurgencies today are the same as 1830) and trendoidism (history is bunk and is so September 10).
At the same time, he has a solid argument. He revisits the analogy of the ‘long tail’ as a way to understand the dark bazaar of technology and ideas that drives contemporary warfare, making the refreshing case that we shouldn’t over-mythologise the network phenomenon, and that the rise of self-starting bunches of guys waging their own franchised war is as much a problem as a benefit for militant Islam.
His book is about much else besides, including the idea that the culture-centric warfare paradigm and the notion of human ’soil’ represents a shift back to the 19th century.
Great work Thomas. I can’t wait to read the book.
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