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SWJ BLOG: THE THIRD GENERATION GANGS OF IRAQ

The SWJ Blog is developing very nicely in terms of steadily drawing high quality contributors. The latest examples are Dr. Robert J. Bunker ( Non-State Threats and Future Wars) and John P. Sullivan ( Center for Advanced Studies on Terrorism). They have a post up entitled:

“Iraq & the Americas: 3 GEN Gangs Lessons and Prospects“

“Gangs and Iraqi insurgents, militias, and other non-state groups share common origins based on tribalism, and therefore, it is expected that they will exhibit similar structures and behaviors. It is our belief that further insight into Iraq’s present situation and future prospects may be derived from a perspective utilizing 3rd generation gang (3 GEN Gangs) studies which present lessons learned from the emergence and spread of gangs within the United States, and other parts of the world, over roughly the last four decades. (1) Basically, from a 3 GEN Gangs perspective, three generations of gangs have been found to exist: turf based, drug based, and mercenary based. The first generation gangs, comprising the vast majority, focus on protecting their turf. These gangs, the least developed of the three generational forms, provide both protection and identity to their members and little more. While some drug dealing is evident, it tends with these gangs to be a sideline activity.

….From a 3 GEN Gangs perspective, Iraq has been essentially overrun by 3rd generation gangs and their criminal-soldier equivalents. This is reminiscent of the nightmare scenario for the US already starting to develop in Central and South America (and, to a lesser extent, within the US) with the emergence, growth, and expansion of Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and other Maras. In many ways, the ‘Gangs of Iraq’ are a prelude to the ‘Gangs of the Americas’ that we will be increasingly facing in the Western Hemisphere.”

This brings to mind the analysis of RAND scholar, David Ronfeldt in his excellent working paper ” In Search of How Societies Work: Tribes – The First And Forever Form “.
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BRAVE NEW WAR

Brave New War by John Robb is a book that was really written for two audiences.

The first is the relatively small number of specialists in military affairs, serious students of geopolitics and bloggers who are already avid readers of Robb’s Global Guerillas site. For them, Brave New War is a systematic and footnoted exposition of the theories of conflict and “dangerous ideas” that Robb discusses daily on his blog. They will be entertained and challenged by the same analysis that makes them return again and again to Global Guerillas to debate John Robb and one another.

The second audience is composed of everyone else. Brave New War is simply going to blow them away.

Brave New War is a tightly written, fast-paced work on the emergent nature of warfare, conflict global society with a decidedly dystopian take. In a mixture of original ideas and synthesis of the works of other cutting edge “thought leaders”, Robb, a platform designer and former mission commander for USAF Counterterrorism operations, draws analogies from the tech world to explain changes in warfare in the age of globalization. Calling the Iraq War “ the modern equivalent of the Spanish Civil War” Robb highlights a robust number of critical concepts in Brave New War that are, in his view, altering international and subnational conflict, including:

Bazaar of Violence
Black Swans
Brittle Security
Dynamc Decentralized Resilience
Emergent Intelligence
Fourth Generation Warfare
Guerilla Entrepreneurs
Global Guerillas
Market-States
Minimalist Platforms
Open-Source Warfare
Plausible Promises
Primary Loyalties
Stigmergic Systems
Superempowered Groups
Systempunkt
The Long Tail of Warfare
Urban Takedowns

Some of these concepts are Robb’s, some belong to others and in Brave New War you will find citations for figures as diverse as William Lind, Chris Anderson, Nicholas Nassim Taleb, Valdis Krebs, Eric S. Raymond, Thomas P.M. Barnett, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Philip Bobbitt, Moises Naim and David A. Deptula. One of the great strengths of Brave New War is Robb’s capacity as an analyst and theorist to apply the revelations of research into network theory to warfare, and to conceptualize armed political conflict within the framework of platforms and ecosystems. This gives Robb’s arguments a degree of horizontal “interconnectedness” seldom seen in works on military affairs ( except, as Robb himself points out, in the work of his frequent online sparring partner, Thomas Barnett).

Robb is betting heavily on increasing levels of global instability and systemic breakdown as “feedback” from global guerillas overloads “the system” and disrupts globalization. It is this orientation toward discerning the worst-case scenarios and descent into entropy that will raise hackles amongst some readers, though Robb ultimately predicts a strengthening of systemic resilience and a burst of innovation as a result of these tribulations.

Brave New War is the must read book of 2007.

OTHER REVIEWS:

Haft of The Spear

Simulated Laughter

Futurejacked

LATEST EDITION OF MILITARY THEORY:PRIMER SERIES

The topic of Part III is 4GW and it is up over at Chicago Boyz.

Initially, I left out 5GW as there is no consensus among bloggers, much less professional strategists, as to what it is or if it exists at all. However, as questions about 5GW were already raised by commenters, I will do a short follow-up with a selection of links.

NEW BLOGGING SERIES

I’ve started a series of posts at Chicago Boyz entitled “Cutting Edge Military Theory: A Primer (Part I.)“. It is intended to be an introduction for a general audience that may be unaware of folks like John Boyd, Art Cebrowski, Tom Barnett, William Lind, John Robb, John Arquilla, Chet Richards, Thomas Hammes and the bewildering array of acronyms, concepts and neologistic jargon they have unleashed on the world of warfare. It was an idea, originally suggested, as it happens, by Lexington Green.

Those of you with expertise or strong opinions on military matters, feel free to hop in on the comments section at Chicago Boyz and make free with the questions that may arise.

INFORMATION VELOCITY: KNOWLEDGE OPPORTUNITIES OR WHITE NOISE?

Dave Davison at Thoughts Illustrated posted on Linda Stone, who was featured in the HBR List:Breakthrough Ideas 2007 ( which I picked up from Steve at ERMB) Dave wrote:

“Idea #7 a description by Linda Stone of her extremely apt phrase for our chaotic times: “Continuous Partial Attention (CPA)” .

“This constant checking of handheld electronic devices has become epidemic, and it illustrates what I call ‘continuous partial attention.’ Although continuous partial attention appears to mimic that much discussed behavior, multitasking, it springs from a different impulse. When we multitask, we are trying to be more productive and more efficient, giving equal priority to all the things we do—simultaneously filing or copying papers, talking on the phone, eating lunch, and so forth. Multitasking rarely requires much cognitive processing, because the tasks involved are fairly automatic. Continuous partial attention, by contrast, involves constantly scanning for opportunities and staying on top of contacts, events, and activities in an effort to miss nothing. It’s an adaptive behavior that has emerged over the past two decades, in stride with Web-based and mobile computing, and it connects us to a galaxy of possibilities all day every day. The assumption behind the behavior is that personal bandwidth can match the endless bandwidth technology offers.”

Stone argues that personal bandwidth is not up to the task and, as a result, a backlash to continuous partial attention has already started. She also worries that information overload will burn people out much more quickly as they strain to keep up with an increasing number of information sources all screaming for attention. “

It occured to me from Stone’s use of the term “scanning” that “continuous partial attention” is a behavior that probably has a strong evolutionary base as it would offer obvious survival advantages to early humans who manifested that kind of alert and reactive perception to minor changes in the immediate environment. A behavior that can be relaxed when we are in locales where our need for safety and security are relatively assured norms.

Scanning for information in Continuous Partial attention increases the velocity of information flow to the brain and we would be constantly assessing the value of the given information in terms of “spending” our attention by increasing our focused concentration and going “deeper”. Judiciously practiced, continuous partial attention would yield certain efficiencies in terms of time saved and increased probablity for generating bursts of insight. These would be moments where real learning could potentially take place, opportunities to acquire or, add to, useful knowledge.

The ability to assess information while it is in a dynamic state of flow would appear to be critical. Without that cognitive function establishing the moment for increased attention (and screening out the less valuable flows, the partial attention would come to resemble “white noise” where jumbles of data would represent a stressful, chaotic, environment in which thinking would be more difficult.

Dave is pointing to the development of visualization tools to help bring analytic order to a CPA state. It may be that some day, instead of scrolling through readers or meta-aggregators, we might have montages that we can view and then decide to click an image to read a particular post out of hundreds in just a a second or two; or symbolic ordering systems to classify new posts and articles according to our own criteria. A “visualization before reading” format.

Possibilities abound.

RELATED LINKS:

The Attention Economy And The Net

The Value of Openess in an Attention Economy

Attention Economy

John Hagel

A desktop reference for all visualizers : the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods –Dave Davison

Visual Literacy.org

INTELLIGENCE AND INTELLIGENCES – Zenpundit

Attention vs. Meaning – Dave Davison