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Galrahn of Information Dissemination was interviewed by James Joyner and Dave Schuler at OTB Radio. The interview is approximately an hour. 

OTB Radio – Tonight at 7 Eastern 

As usual, Dave Schuler will co-host.  We’ll be joined tonight by Raymond Pritchett, who blogs under the pseudonym Galrahn at Information Dissemination and the United States Naval Institute Blog.  We’ll talk about the Somali pirates, the state of the U.S. Navy, and the Tea Party Protests.

Tom Barnett has a muscular op-ed piece up in Esquire Magazine that is making some waves:

Inside the War Against Robert Gates

….When it came to selling that paradigm shift, Gates didn’t need to convince the military itself – the ascendant Army and Marine corps have suffered enough casualties to have learned it the hard way. And quite honestly, Gates needn’t worry about the defense industry’s willingness to follow the money, because Lockheed Martin and L-3 have been snatching up enough blue-chip companies to prove they can spot the Pentagon’s future funding spigots.

Turns out you can find Gates’s biggest antagonists in the halls of Congress, where the battle cry of “Jobs, jobs, jobs!” echoes the military’s growing embrace of funding for the manpower that’ll keep this counter-insurgency movement as successful as it’s become. So even amidst all this fighting and dying – neither of which is likely to slow down any time soon – the American military’s newest struggle seems to come down to one question: whose economic stabilization package matters more?

Read the rest here.

Galrahn, writing at USNI Blog about my recent post on Mexico, raised an important question: “Are Weak States a worse outcome from the perspective of U.S. national security than a Failed State?”. Galrahn comes down squarely against the “muddling through” of a weak state:

Failed States Are Worse Than Weak States

….My point would be this: there is no value in the cartels overthrowing the Mexican government because its existence helps them more than its absence helps them.

But this is my larger point. There are currently zero, none, nada 4GW/COIN/Whatever military solutions for failed states; our emerging 4GW/COIN/Whatever doctrines, strategies, and theories only apply for weak states that have legitimate governments that can be supported. Failed states are problems that can be handled, even in an ugly way, by conventional military forces. The danger to US strategic interests is not failed states, as is often claimed, rather the real danger to US strategic interests always comes from weak states.

The ugly truth is, failed states allow for freedom of action by military forces without consequence; weak states do not allow such freedom of military action. Afghanistan before 9/11 was a weak state, not a failed state, thus Al Qaeda operated under the state governance of the Taliban and had top cover to carry out its evil agenda. In Somalia, pirates operate in a failed state, and as a failed state the west has taken military action, including cruise missiles, hostage rescue attempts with special forces, and other military activities without consequence against targets as they have been identified. The danger Somalia poses in the future to US strategic interests is not that Somalia continues as a failed state, rather if it were to become a weak state with a recognized legitimate government strong enough to say, eliminate the pirate threat while still being too weak to prevent the training and development of terrorist cells.

….but because it is a weak state, we face serious and complex diplomatic obsticles in taking freedom of action, even along our own national border. In a failed state, we could do what needed to be done to take out the bad guys. As a weak state, we are far more limited in options, and must account for the legitimate governments perspective a lot more than we would if Mexico was a failed state.

Zenpundit may or may not be right regarding the threat posed by Mexico, but if he believes Mexico as a failed state is more dangerous than a Mexico as a weak state, he is mistaken.

Read the whole post here.

I found Galrahn’s argument to be very intriguing. There’s the issue of Mexico specifically in his post and then Weak States being worse than Failed States as a general rule. First, Mexico:

The thought experiment I penned previously aside, Mexico is not yet a Failed State and I hope it does not become one – though I would not wager a mortgage payment on it staying away from catastrophic failure. Mexico is definitely, in my view, already a Weak State suddenly resisting the process of being “hollowed out”, slowly, by vicious drug cartels. I wish President Calderon well in his efforts to crush the narco networks, but just as America cannot avoid admitting that our drug laws are impacting Mexico severely, let’s not let the fact that Mexico’s ruling oligarchy has also brought this disaster on themselves with their self-aggrandizingly corrupt political economy escape comment.

The crony-capitalist-politico ruling class in Mexico ruthlessly squeezes their poor but ambitious countrymen to emigrate and is too greedy to even invest properly in the very security services that keeps their own state apparatus afloat. Mexico is not a poor country, their GDP is in the same league as that of Australia, India or the Netherlands. Mexico can afford to pay for a professional police, a functioning judiciary and a larger Army at a minimum. On a more reasonable level, Mexico can also afford basic public education and core public services for it’s citizens and could liberalize it’s economy further to stimulate entrepreneurship. They choose not to do so. An elite that stubbornly refuses to reform, even in the interest of self-preservation, is not a group likely to make statesmanlike decisions in the Cartel War.

If Mexico fails, really fails on the order of Lebanon in the 1980’s or Somalia since the 1990’s, Galrahn is correct that the U.S. military would, in the last analysis, have a free hand to do things in Mexico that could not be remotely contemplated today. However the  second and third order effects of a Failed State Mexico are calamitous enough that I’d prefer to skip enjoying that kind of “free hand”. Unless Mexicans have something in their DNA that makes them different from Iraqis, Afghans, Cambodians or Kosovar Albanians, extreme levels of violence in one area will cause them to move to areas of relative safety in another place. Internal displacement will precede external displacement. Elite flight will precede the flight of the masses.

That brings us to the general question of, is a Failed State better or worse than a Weak State whose tattered shreds of international legitimacy prevent robust foreign intervention? I am going to “punt” by inclining toward judging on a case-by-case basis. “Failed State Botswana” is not likely to impact the world very much nor is “Functional State Congo” going to look very good next to anything except Congo as the Failed State that it is. Now “Failed State China” or “Failed State Russia”, that has consequences that are the stuff of nightmares.

What do you say? Which is worse: Weak State or Failed State?

ADDENDUM:

SWJ Blog links to a Washington Post series on the Cartel War

My previous post stirred some interest in the blogosphere on the issue of Mexico being in danger of becoming a “Failed State” and prompted others to respond with Mexico related analysis of their own. Here are some that caught my eye:

           POINT – Mexico is a Failed State or at least in some danger of becoming so:

Threatswatch.org (Fraser) Los Zetas and the Denial of Mexico’s Failed State Status

The softening of words and the aversion to stating the obvious by the Administration simply obliterates the reality that President Felipe Calderón of Mexico “leads” a country dominated by the cartels and not governed by the federal government. The transparent denial of the recent Joint Operating Environment report is troubling at best.

To better understand just how close to the precipice he is, it might be worthwhile to take another look at the organization (and movement) of Los Zetas. As a reminder, Los Zetas are a paramilitary group tied to the Gulf Cartel. Their origins and their evolution from being deserters from the Mexican special forces to a criminal organization is chronicled in a report from International Relations and Security Network

….With each of the original members training at least another ten, they grew to over 300 strong by 2003. In just the first quarter of 2009, Los Zetas (the organization) has been linked to a death threat against the president of Guatemala, the hand grenade tossed in Pharr, Texas and various other criminal acts. The ranks of Los Zetas has grown, and strikingly, they have broken ranks with the Gulf Cartel. Over time however, and with the deaths of some of the original Zetas, they have morphed into an organization. This is a very important distinction to note.

RBO – Are Afghanistan, Pakistan, Mexico ‘failed states’? If so, then what?

….In particular there is recent debate as to whether Mexico is/is not a failed state. If it is, then we ask whether its “failed” status is on a par with such other failed states as Pakistan and Afghanistan? – Even though there are those who do not subscribe to the notion that either of them is a failed state.

As always, let’s start at the beginning. What is a failed state?

In the simplest of definitions, a failed state is one that has a “shattered social and political structure.”

Writing December 1999 for the International Review of the Red Cross, Daniel Thürer, J.D. (right), Professor of International Law, European Law, Constitutional Law and Administrative Law at the University of Zurich, said

Failing States are invariably the product of a collapse of the power structures providing political support for law and order, a process generally triggered and accompanied by “anarchic” forms of internal violence.

Dr. Thürer wrote that former Secretary-General of the United Nations, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, described this situation in the following way (emphasis added):

A feature of such conflicts is the collapse of state institutions, especially the police and judiciary, with resulting paralysis of governance, a breakdown of law and order, and general banditry and chaos. Not only are the functions of government suspended, but its assets are destroyed or looted and experienced officials are killed or flee the country. This is rarely the case in inter-state wars. It means that international intervention must extend beyond military and humanitarian tasks and must include the promotion of international reconciliation and the re-establishment of effective government. States in which institutions and law and order have totally or partially collapsed under the pressure and amidst the confusion of erupting violence, yet which subsist as a ghostly presence on the world map, are now commonly referred to as “failed States” or “Etats sans gouvernement”.

Jay Fraser, who has been watching developments in Mexico for some time, drills down on the most violent and fastest evolving faction among the cartel groups in Mexico. Procrustes concentrates on the “Failed State” concept and examines how conditions in Mexico compare to academic yardsticks and the case studies of Afghanistan and Pakistan, two countries that inevitably crop up in discussions of failed and failing states.

          COUNTERPOINT – Mexico is not a failing state or has greater resilience than experts are acknowledging:

Apropos Two Theories – Why Mexico may NOT fall apart – and a way to think about it

I’ve never seen so many American analysts and journalists sounding alarms about Mexico – most for good reasons, others for their own agendas. And it’s true, parts of Mexico have turned awfully violent, barely governable. Government controls have weakened, and security trends are adverse. Domestic terrorism and insurgency are not presently the problem; it’s the extreme crime and corruption, driven by the drug cartels and other criminal gangs.

….Yet, I’m struck that long-time American experts who specialize on Mexico are not providing counter-arguments. A few Mexicans are, lately Enrique Krauze. But no Americans I know of (though I’ve not searched exhaustively).Shouldn’t analysts and journalists who specialize on Mexico be doing a better job of wondering whether and why the growing alarmism may be wrong – again?When I worked as a specialist on Mexico, I experienced three or four periods when Mexico seemed to be on the verge of instability, in particular:

• In 1968, at the time of the student uprising and its military suppression (I was then a graduate student studying in Mexico City).
• During 1984-8, when a few U.S. government analysts claimed that Mexico was about to collapse due to multiple economic, political, and other crises.
• In 1994-5, when the Zapatista uprising raised new specters of widespread insurgency, if not terrorism.
  

Each time Mexico remained stable and recovered. And it did so mostly for reasons that American analysts had not understood or anticipated well at the time – including American experts on Mexico who did not buy into the alarmism.In these three instances, the key stabilizing factor turned out to be some kind of social or organizational network that American analysts were barely aware of:

• In 1968, it was intra-elite networking that revolved around the mysterious camarilla system (or so I think, though I was just a grad student then).
• In the mid 1980s, it was familial and other social networks that cushioned the effects of unemployment and other economic displacements.
• In 1994, it was the roles played by newly-formed networks of human-rights and other activist NGOs, first in calming the Zapatista scene, later in monitoring the 1994 presidential election campaign.

Conditions in Mexico look worse than ever this time around – much worse, not just along the U.S. border, but everywhere that the drug cartels are powerful. So I’m not suggesting optimism, but rather a search for additional factors that may moderate the equations of gloom.What might keep Mexico from disintegrating this time? My guesstimate is that networks will be the decisive factor again. And the networks that will matter most this time are:

1. Informal intra-elite social networks that reflects what’s left of the old camarilla dynamic.
2. Cross-border organizational networks for U.S.-Mexico security (military, police, intel) cooperation

David Ronfeldt, for new readers here, is a major “edge” thinker in the national security field at RAND and is a co-author (with John Arquilla) of the influential “classic”,  Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy , which sits on my shelf about two feet from me as I type this. As it happens, Ronfeldt also specialized in Mexican and Latin American security as an analyst during the Cold War which gives means that his caveats are worth careful consideration. Frankly, we are all better off if Ronfeldt is correct and the “alarmists” are wrong, though I think the grim state of affairs south of the Rio Grande is deterring most Mexico experts  from going out on a limb to make positive predictions.

I wanted to say “thank you” to The Watcher’s Council for having a post of mine under consideration ( I came in 2nd in their non-Council category) and to Dave Schuler of The Glittering Eye for the nomination. The fine blogs that compose The Watcher’s Council are:

Watcher of Weasels
The Education Wonks
The Glittering Eye
Rhymes With Right
Joshuapundit
Soccer Dad
The Colossus of Rhodey
Bookworm Room
Cheat-Seeking Missiles
Wolf Howling
Hillbilly White Trash
The Razor
Mere Rhetoric
The Provocateur

To fellow foreign policy aficianado Pundita for her unsolicited but gracious posting (cross-posted to RBO as well, doubleplusgood thanks!) on Threats in the Age of Obama. Despite our formidible marketing budget of $ 0, word-of-blog is the primary vehicle for raising attention on our national security project, which Pundita correctly identifies as a hard core Think Tank 2.0 effort committed to preservation in dead tree format. Here’s Pundita’s post:

The Virtual Think Tank and thinking about security threats in the Twenty-First Century

Mark Safranski, whose ZenPundit blog has been a staple at Pundita since the early days, is a contributor to the newly-published Threats in the Age of Obama, a collection of essays edited by Michael Tanji. ZenPundit has assembled quotes from a few of the essays in Tanji’s book, which give an idea of the breadth of interests represented by the contributors. I haven’t yet read Threats, and I’m not familiar with all the people that Tanji has gathered for his book (see the list of contributors below). But from the names I’m familiar with the book is a good overview of the security threats that Obama’s administration needs to deal with.The book is also an example of the Virtual Think Tank; as such it’s as much an example of cross-discipline thinking as it is a primer on this era’s security threats.

….Tanji, a former supervisory intelligence officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency, is well-aware of the limitations of the Virtual Think Tank (see his essay on the topic, which I’ve linked to above). But clearly he hopes its unfettered scope will prevent the worst oversights to arise from the blinkered research and analysis that academia produces.We should all hope. In this era, when a handful of people can wreak as much destruction as a million-man army, the window for saying, ‘Back to the drawing board’ is very narrow.

Read the rest here.