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Dr. Chet Richards has passed along information that there will be an upcoming BOYD CONFERENCE at Quantico on October 15th and 16th at the Al Gray Research Center. The organizer of the conference is LTC. Stan Coerr, and he is busy assembling a line-up of presenters who include LTG Paul Van Riper, Robert Coram, GI Wilson, Don Vandergriff, Fred Leland and others.

I can’t really give out Col. Coerr’s email without the gentleman’s permission but for those readers who are seriously interested in attending, either send me your email address or leave it in the comments and I will coallate them and send them on.  I am not sure yet if I will be attending as it depends heavily on my work commitments, but I’d like to be there.

UPDATE:

Rob Paterson has more details on the Boyd Conference including contact information for registration:

….This symposium goes beyond Boyd’s Work. His influence on other professions and individuals making efforts to more effective outcomes in their perspective fields will be the focus of the Boyd and Beyond symposium. Topics discussed will focus not only on important military issues but will, as well, take Boyd’s theories into the different professions and realms of conflict these professions deal with.  How Boyd’s theories apply and what they have done to make all more effective at solving problems via the observation. orientation, decision and action cycles.

Understanding the OODA Loop, and the effects; Interaction, Insight,  Imagination, and Initiative, Command and Influence (LEADERSHIP) have on the constant repetitive nature of the decision making cycle can when leveraged, lead to gaining the advantage or as COL John Boyd stated; the essence of winning and losing;

“The essence of winning and losing is in learning how to shape or influence events so that we not only magnify our spirit and strength but also influence potential adversaries as well as the uncommitted so that they are drawn toward our philosophy and are empathetic towards our success.”

Law Enforcement, Homeland Security Professionals, Colleges and University Safety and Security, Hospital Security, Hotel Security and private business looking to keep their workplace safe, will benefit from the lessons learned and applied at this symposium. Developing better strategies, tactics and methods and operational art to make your organization more effective in all that it does, is the type of learning that will take place at the Boyd and Beyond Symposium

Summer Series 2010: Reviewing the Books! has begun. This review was originally posted in July, 2010 and is being re-posted as part of Summer Series:

Koran, Kalashnikov and Laptop by Antonio Giustozzi

I just finished reading Koran, Kalashnikov and Laptop: The Neo-Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan by historian Antonio Giustozzi who has subsequently gone on to write in rapid succession, Decoding the New Taliban: Insights from the Afghan Field and Empires of Mud, which I intend to read as well. Giustozzi is doing something important with his study of the Neo-Taliban insurgency that twenty years ago, a professional historian would have eschewed: applying his his historical expertise and methodology in a disciplinary synthesis to understand a dynamic, emerging, phenomenon at the center of current policy.

At the outset, Giustozzi writes:

This book is written by a historian who is trying to understand contemporary developments making use of not just the historical method, but also drawing from other disciplines such as anthropology, political science and geography. As a result, this book combines an analysis of the development of the insurgency based on available information with my ongoing work, focused on identifying the root causes of the weakness of the Afghan state.

This is a useful investigative methodological approach. “Useful” in the sense that while adhering to scholarly standards, Giustozzi offers readers the benefit of his capacity as a professional historian to evaluate new information about the war with the Neo-Taliban, while orienting it in the appropriate cultural-historical context. Not all of the information dealt with is reliable; Giustozzi candidly explains the disputes around particular unverified claims or accusations before offering his educated guess where the truth may be or the probabilities involved in a fog of war and ethno-tribal animosities.

Koran, Kalashnikov and Laptop is an academic book with a fairly detached tone and heavily endnoted chapters, which Giustozzi divided in the following manner:

1. Sources of the insurgency

2. How and why the Taliban recruited

3. Organization of the Taliban

4. The Taliban’s strategy

5. Military tactics of the insurgency

6. The counter-insurgency effort

The chapters have a wealth of detail, bordering at times on minutia, on Afghanistan’s complex and personalized system of politics which help shed light on why the effort at providing effective governance, a key COIN tenet, is so difficult. One example:

“….Strengthened as it was by powerful connections in Kabul, Sher Mohammed’s ‘power bloc’ proved quite resilient. Some of the Kabul press reported ‘criticism’, by former and current government officials from Helmand, of Daoud, whose attempts to restrain and isolate the rogue militias and police forces of helmand were described in terms of collaborationism with the Taliban. Daoud reacted by accusing the local ‘drug mafia’ of plotting against him and tried to convince President Karzai to leave him in his post, but not even British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s efforts sufficed to save him. Karzai sacked Daoud in the autumn of 2006. His replacement, Asadullah Wafa, was widely seen as a weak figure who for several months even refused to deploy to Lashkargah.”

This example is a typical one for political life in the provinces. Karzai’s counterinsurgency strategy does not have much to do with ours, and is largely antithetical to it. What we call “corruption”, Karzai sees as buying loyalty; what we call good governance, Karzai views as destabilizing his regime. We are not on the same page with Hamid Karzai and perhaps not even in the same playbook.

Giustozzi is exceptionally well-informed about Afghanistan and the political and military nuances of the old Taliban and the Neo-Taliban insurgency and the structure of Koran, Kalashnikov and Laptop is clear and well-organized. Giustozzi is informed about COIN in this context but less so generally (in a minor glitch, he posits Mao as primarily waging guerrilla war against an Imperial Japan – Mao didn’t – which did not have much of a “technological edge” – which Japan certainly did over Chinese forces, Nationalist or Communist, for most of the war) but Giustozzi is not writing to add to COIN theory literature, as he specifically noted. What the reader will get from Giustozzi is a grasp of who the Neo-Taliban are as a fighting force and the convoluted, granular, social complexity of Afghan political life in which the US is attempting to wage a COIN war.

Koran, Kalashnikov and Laptop is strongly recommended.