Recommended Reading
National Defense – Marines Use Simulations To Hone ‘Critical Thinking’ Skills – Grace V. Jean
Before sending them to war, the Corps puts units through a pre-deployment exercise called “Mojave Viper” at Twentynine Palms, Calif. The simulated battle gives marines a chance to test their cognitive decision-making skills against live actors who role-play tribal leaders, civilians and insurgents. With the digital trainer, “we can better prepare the unit or leader for that live exercise through some of these other tools, and give them an opportunity to rehearse and remediate through numerous repetitions,” said Lt. Col. Dave Lucas, program manager of Combat Hunter.
….The interactive program walks students through a number of scenarios in which they are asked to interpret what is going on and to look for clues that can tip them off to potential threats. For example, if troops are arriving in an area for the first time, they can look at the townspeople’s body language to learn about their attitudes. Details such as whether they are standing in an open or closed posture, exposing the soles of their feet – an insult in many Middle Eastern cultures – or making eye contact are subtle but crucial signs of friendliness or hostility.
ISN – Mexican Cartels Recruit Texan Teens – Samuel Logan
Teenage assassin
Rosalio Reta, also known as “Bart,” worked for Miguel Treviño, the second in command of Los Zetas, one of Mexico’s most powerful criminal organizations. Based in Nuevo Laredo, Triveño oversaw the movement of drugs through his city into the Texan city of Laredo and destinations beyond, across the eastern half of the US.
Reta likely never met Treviño, but did spend enough time in the bars of Nuevo Laredo to meet one of Treviño’s recruiters, someone on the lookout for young American kids interested in earning a little money on the side. Reta, however, was not hired to work as a mule, the most common job for new recruits. He was hired to kill; and as court documents revealed, he killed for the first time when he was 13, in 2000 or 2001.
As he grew into his assassin role, eliminating targets for Treviño on both sides of the border, Reta began earning between $5,000 and $50,000 a hit. He sometimes received a bonus – a kilo or two of pure cocaine – and at the very least received a $500 weekly retainer fee just so he was available when his Mexican handlers called.
That’s it!
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Schmedlap:
December 14th, 2009 at 7:03 am
Norvell De Atkine. There’s a name I haven’t seen lately. I reread "Why Arabs Lose Wars" a few times, a few years back, while training a newly created IA Battalion. It didn’t make things any easier, but it helped to explain them.
zen:
December 14th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
hi Schmedlap,
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Ah, no better praise for an academic (ok…semi-academic, retired practitioner) than a practitioner saying " this helped". Say, BTW, what are doing with all those French "cohabitation" period docs ?
Schmedlap:
December 14th, 2009 at 7:31 pm
My intent is to set fire to them.
Charles Cameron:
December 14th, 2009 at 7:36 pm
I’m glad to see someone recommending Brig. Malik’s book, The Qur’anic Concept of War. I had to order my copy from India in 2002, but it is now available on Scribd, and there’s at least an excerpt — I haven’t seen it myself, but I doubt it contains the entire text — in Jim Lacey’s The Canons of Jihad: Terrorists’ Strategy for Defeating America.
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But I’m frankly puzzled by the seeming lack of attention paid to the book — the only reference to it I could find on the CTC site was in an article in the Sentinel by Marisa Urgo and Jack Williams titled Al-Qa`ida’s Medinan Strategy: Targeting Global Energy Infrastructure — so I wonder, have we been studiously ignoring this book, or is there some other reason I have seen so little that draws on it?
zen:
December 14th, 2009 at 8:07 pm
LOL! As someone who was once forced to pore over the records of the Temporary National Economic Committee for the permutations of the Depression-era international trade in rubber, I salute you.
zen:
December 15th, 2009 at 2:47 am
Hi Charles,
.
I have seen Malik referenced 3-4 times in passing in the last month ( inc. this article) so it may just be wandering "on the radar" of the strategy-security types now. Naturally, you were years ahead of the curve but I imagine Pakistan specialists and defense attache types also knew of it.
Charles Cameron:
December 15th, 2009 at 4:16 am
Now you’ve got me wondering where I came across Brig. Malik’s book, Zen. Reuven Firestone includes it in the bibliography of his 1999 book, Jihad The Origin of Holy War in Islam, so that’s a possibility.
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Incidentally, there’s an interesting discussion of its "canonicity" by Raymond Ibrahim among others, on Harvard’s Middle Easter Strategy site, the consensus being that it’s a bit too "noble" to represent guidelines that AQ would follow, but definitely a useful guide to the territory. Ibrahim put together the 2007 collection The Al Qaeda Reader, which was noteworthy for its insistence that theology was relevant to jihad.
Charles Cameron:
December 15th, 2009 at 4:21 am
Ach: typo — it’s the Middle Eastern Strategy at Harvard (MESH) site, and it is the discussion titled Islam’s war doctrines ignored.