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I continue to be impressed with Dr. John Mackinlay‘s  The Insurgent Archipelago . You might not agree with everything Mackinlay has to say on insurgency or COIN theory but his book is deeply thought-provoking the way The Pentagon’s New Map, Brave New War or The Genius of the Beast are thought-provoking books. As a reader, you highlight. You underline. You scribble praise, condemnation or some relevant factoid in the margins.

This is going to be an influential text.

In Mackinlay’s view, America and the West have failed to adequately understand what and whom they are fighting in the War on Terror. The phenomenon that has eluded them is that alongside older, Maoist iterations of guerrilla warfare, the cutting edge of insurgency has evolved up into a decentralized, networked, partly virtual, Post-Maoism. General staffs, intelligence services, national security officials and diplomats remained hypnotized by the Maoist model that was so frequently aped in the 60’s and 70’s by secular leftists and Third World Marxists in Vietnam, Algeria and subsaharan Africa.

Some excerpts, followed by my analysis, which you are free to disagree with or just put in your own two cents about in the comments section:

Mackinlay writes [p. 164]:

….NATO governments and a majority of their security staff did not recognize post-Maoism as a form of insurgency either. Although they lived in a post-industrial era and directly experienced its social consequences, they dealt with post-9/11 insurgent phenomenon from a Maoist perspective; they neither saw it nor engaged it as a global movement that involved a greater array of dispersed supporters. They also failed to recognize it as an insurgency.

Very true. Even though if the organizational behavior of al Qaida and its affiliated movements had taken place within one nation-state, Cold War era graybeard officials and international law NGO activists of 2001-2004 vintage would have called them a guerilla movement; that al Qaida’s activities took place across many international borders seriously confounded them in an intellectual sense. Obviously, they must be common criminals, no different than junkies who stick-up a 7-11, to be properly mirandized! Call the FBI and have OJ’s dream team ready when we make an arrest! Or Osama is a state-sponsored terrorists of Saddam! No, wait, of Iran!

And so it went, and still goes on to this day as the USG contorts itself into a legal pretzel  in order to never have proper war crimes trials or execute convicted war criminals. Or even admit they are “Islamists” motivated by a reified ideology (Mackinlay’s term “Post-Maoist” may soon come in to vogue at the NSC).

America is like the Gulliver of COIN, bound fast by the cords of politically correct nonsense.

….Because few academics had explained insurgency as a multidisciplinary, as opposed to a narrowly military, process they failed to see how their own populations were vulnerable to insurgent movements, and that when it happened to them it would not look like its classic Maoist antecedent. Countering insurgency required a counterintuitive effort and making this intellectual leap was problematic when military planners had such an idee fixe of insurgency as eternally Maoist form.

I interpret this paragraph as Mackinlay blending the Euro-Anglo-American state of affairs, but it does not apply equally to all, in my view.

Humanities and social science academics are simply not as good at or as intellectually comfortable with true multidisciplinary thinking as are their counterparts in the hard sciences. Nor are the social science faculty particularly friendly, in most universities, toward the US national security and intelligence communities or the Pentagon (though I suspect the situation in 2010 is better than in 2000 or 1990). Nor are American universities oversupplied with military historians or scholars of strategic studies.

Academia, however is not at fault as much as Mackinlay indicates. Even if we had Clausewitz collaborating with Ibn Khaldun and Marshall Mcluhan to write our white papers, the USG interagency process is fundamentally broken and could not execute their recommendations. State is grossly underfunded, institutionally disinclined to turn out FSO’s in the mold of Errol Flynn and is in need of a systemic overhaul. USIA and USAID need to be reborn as heavyweight players. The CIA has problems almost as severe as does State and does not play well with others, including the DNI. There is no “whole of government” approach present that could approximate an “operational jointness”, so presidents increasingly rely on the military as the hammer for all nails ( the military may not do the right thing but at least it does something, as the saying goes).

Mackinlay writes [p. 164-165]

….By 2008 the most up-to-date doctrine was still stuck in expeditionary form, in other words focused on a campaign epicentre that lay in a particular overseas territory and its traditional, or at best modernising, society. The following characteristics that distinguished post-Maoism had not been engaged:

• The involvement of multiple populations which challenged the concept of a center of gravity
• Mass communications and connectivity
• The migration factor
• The virtual factor
• The centrality of propaganda of the deed in the insurgent’s concept of operations
• The bottom-up direction of activist energy
• Absence of plausible end-state objectives in the insurgent’s manifesto

Mackinlay gets much right here but some things wrong – and what is incorrect is arguably quite important – but as an indictment of the failure of the West to adequately address globalized insurgency, it is spot on in many respects.

First, in regard to Mackinlay’s attack on Clausewitzian theory, I am not persuaded that a “center of gravity” for our enemies does not exist or apply so much as its form is not a particularly convenient one (i.e. -easily targetable) or politically comfortable for our elites to acknowledge.

We could conceive of al Qaida’s CoG being Bin Laden’s inner circle hiding somewhere in Pakistan – probably Rawalpindi – that we do not yet dare to strike. Or we could say that the CoG is al Qaida’s “plausible promise” that the “far enemy” of radical Islamism, the US, can be brought down, as was the USSR, by being bled to death by drawing America into endless and expensive wars. Or that the CoG is al Qaida’s peculair, Qutbist-inspired, takfiri, revolutionary Islamist ideology. Our elites recoil from openly confronting any of those possible scenarios but that does not mean that a CoG is not present, only that we lack the will to attack their CoG head-on.

US COIN doctrine is expeditionary – essentially internal COIN for America ended with the Compromise of 1877 and the end of three centuries of “Indian Wars”. Political correctness, not doctrinal rigidity, precludes recognizing Islamist lone wolf terrorists like Maj. Hasan as anything other than mentally ill spree killers, no different from the school shooters at Columbine or Andrew Cunanan. The USG would not recognize an insurgency in the states as an insurgency even if it had flags, a government-in-exile, an air force and armored divisions. Even the capture of verified and admitted members of al Qaida inside the United States, who are covered by a properly authorized AUMF, causes an epidemic of pants-wetting among the elite, if we proceed to try them with military tribunals or commissions.

We do not have a political elite as a national leadership who are prepared to entertain the full strategic ramifications of the existence of a “globalized insurgency”. They do not ignore it completely – the COIN doctrine articulated best by David Kilcullen and John Nagl is to de-fang al Qaida as a strategic threat by isolating it from the “Accidental Guerrilla” groups whose Islamist concerns are parochial and national in character rather than global. So, al Qaida is seen by the American national security community as a de facto globalized insurgency with a reach that extends everywhere – except of course inside the United States. Unless we intercept foreign Islamist terrorists crossing the border or boarding a plane, any violent actions committed here resembling terrorism are purely a law enforcement issue and must be wholly unrelated to Islamist extremism.

It’s a bizarrely illogical strategic worldview – and I fear its’ ostrich-like mentality has already spread from War on Terror policy to matters related to the empirically demonstrable, but continuously downplayed, spillover effects of Mexico’s growing narco-insurgency, where high officials prohibit unvarnished “truth telling” from practitioners in the field from reaching the ears of key decision-makers. It’s no way to run a war – or a country – unless the intent is to lose the former by systematically crippling the ability to respond of the latter.

Mackinlay’s characteristics of “Post-Maoism” strike directly and the political and methodological nerve clusters of a Western elite whose power and status are invested in hierarchical, bureaucratic, institutional structures that are defended from urgent demands to reform, in part, by their ideology of political correctness.

This strikes me as an exceedingly bad idea from Google:

From Drudge:

GOOGLE FRANKENSTEIN: MACHINES TO CHOOSE YOUR NEWS
Mon Apr 12 2010 08:15:34 ET

GOOGLE CEO and Obama political activist Eric Schmidt declared this weekend that his machines will help decide what news you receive!

News sites should use technology to PREDICT what a user wants to read by what they have already read, Schmidt told the AMERICAN SOCIETY OF NEWS EDITORS, where a few humans still remained in the audience.

“We’re all in this together.”

MORE

Schmidt said he doesn’t want ‘to be treated as a stranger’ when reading online, POLITICO reports.

He envisions a future where technology for news editing could help tailor advertisements for individual readers.

And he wants to be challenged through technology that ‘directs readers’ to a story with an ‘opposing’ view.

[An odd suggestion from the CEO of a company long accused of offering little to no conservative-leaning links on its news page, while aggressively promoting left-leaning hubs.]

Schmidt said GOOGLE is working on new ways to push adverts and content for consumers, based on what stories they’ve read.

What stories his machines have selected.

Developing…

If this no-choice “opposing view” meme sounds familiar, that’s because a prominent friend and appointee of President Obama, former U. of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein, has, for several years, articulated a sophisticated  theory on the need for government to regulate speech, “reformulate” the 1st Amendment to ensure greater “diversity” and compel the presentation of “opposing views”. While I share Sunstein’s concern that many people are deliberately corrupting their OODA Loops by only reading sources with which they already agree, forcing legal adults to read something else isn’t the answer. It’s a free country and with liberty comes the right to be left to wallow in ignorance in peace.

Getting the Congress and states to turn the free speech and free press clauses on their head is a task with small chance of political success. Persuading or pressuring a small number of friendly CEO’s of search engine companies to optimize their own systems to produce politically favorable results for the administration and the Democratic Party is a lot easier, far less transparent to the public and more difficult for the GOP and conservatives (or for that matter, dissident progressives and unpopular minorities) to combat.

To put it simply, the long term strategy here is that the information aggregators – Google being the 800lb gorilla – will become the new “gatekeepers” with their finger on the scales that determine the page rank of opposing views on controversial issues.

I feared that Google might be tempted to go down this road when they first became entangled with the Chinese government in a way that compromised the integrity of their search engine. At the time I asked:

” If you have agreed to censor what information can be accessed in China in return for greater market opportunities, have you also agreed to censor what information can be accessed about China by the rest of us ?”

As far as I am aware, that question has never been answered, though I think the answer has bearing on American national security and our domestic tranquility. The temptation to use the enormous informational power of Google to deliberately shape public discourse and cultural evolution to “manufacture consent” for policies favored by the elite without the commoners being aware of the manipulation, appears to be very difficult to resist.

I like Google. The company has provided a truly amazing array of informational services that – and I do not think this is an exaggeration – have added real and significant value to civilization. But part of that value comes from Google being regarded universally as an “honest broker” of information. Their CEO’s proposal jeopardizes that trust and once credibility is lost, it is gone for good.

The odd thing is, that this proposal is a really poor business strategy for Google – unless the objective is to create paranoia and drive a large segment of the population to use rival search engines or create new ones free of elite political gamesmanship.

John Arqilla, along with David Ronfeldt, was the pioneering military and security theorist who forseaw the rise of networked non-state adversaries, which they detailed in their now classic book, Networks and Netwars. Below, in a Foreign Policy mag article, Arquilla expounds on the failure of the Pentagon to adapt sufficiently to leverage the power of networks or counter those opponents who have done so.

The New Rules of War

When militaries don’t keep up with the pace of change, countries suffer. In World War I, the failure to grasp the implications of mass production led not only to senseless slaughter, but also to the end of great empires and the bankruptcy of others. The inability to comprehend the meaning of mechanization at the outset of World War II handed vast tracts of territory to the Axis powers and very nearly gave them victory. The failure to grasp the true meaning of nuclear weapons led to a suicidal arms race and a barely averted apocalypse during the Cuban missile crisis.
 
Today, the signs of misunderstanding still abound. For example, in an age of supersonic anti-ship missiles, the U.S. Navy has spent countless billions of dollars on “surface warfare ships” whose aluminum superstructures will likely burn to the waterline if hit by a single missile. Yet Navy doctrine calls for them to engage missile-armed enemies at eyeball range in coastal waters.
 
The U.S. Army, meanwhile, has spent tens of billions of dollars on its “Future Combat Systems,” a grab bag of new weapons, vehicles, and communications gadgets now seen by its own proponents as almost completely unworkable for the kind of military operations that land forces will be undertaking in the years ahead. The oceans of information the systems would generate each day would clog the command circuits so that carrying out even the simplest operation would be a terrible slog.
 
And the U.S. Air Force, beyond its well-known devotion to massive bombing, remains in love with extremely advanced and extremely expensive fighter aircraft — despite losing only one fighter plane to an enemy fighter in nearly 40 years. Although the hugely costly F-22 turned out to function poorly and is being canceled after enormous investment in its production, the Air Force has by no means given up. Instead, the more advanced F-35 will be produced, at a cost running in the hundreds of billions of dollars. All this in an era in which what the United States already has is far better than anything else in the world and will remain so for many decades.
 
These developments suggest that the United States is spending huge amounts of money in ways that are actually making Americans less secure, not only against irregular insurgents, but also against smart countries building different sorts of militaries. And the problem goes well beyond weapons and other high-tech items. What’s missing most of all from the U.S. military’s arsenal is a deep understanding of networking, the loose but lively interconnection between people that creates and brings a new kind of collective intelligence, power, and purpose to bear — for good and ill…..”

Read the rest here.

It was nice to see Arquilla give some props to VADM Art Cebrowski, who is underappreciated these days as a strategic thinker and is much critricized by people who seldom bothered to read anything he actually wrote. Or who like to pretend that he had said a highly networked Naval task force is a good way to tackle an insurgency in an arid, mostly landlocked, semi-urban, middle-eastern nation.

It also occurs to me that one of the reasons that the USAF resisted drones tooth and nail is that robotics combined with swarming points to en end ( or serious diminishment) of piloted warplanes. Eliminating the design requirements implicit in human pilots makes for a smaller, faster, more maneuverable, more lethal aircraft that will probably be infinitely cheaper to make, more easily risked in combat and usable for “swarming”. Ditto attack helicopters.

Of course, nuclear bombers will probably stay in human hands. Probably.

ADDENDUM:

Contentious Small Wars Council thread on Arquilla begun by “student of war” and defense consultant Wilf Owen. I have weighed in as has Shlok Vaidya.

Over at SWJ Blog.

Cartel v. Cartel: Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency

The government’s strategy, essentially a ‘war of attrition’ is failing. The result of heavy-handed military action is the increasing ‘fractilization’ of the conflict, higher levels of violence, and increasing discontent by the general public and elites. Though the war has largely vanished from the mainstream American press after last summer’s panic over the prospect of Mexico as a ‘failed state,’ the violence continues and risks of cross-border spillover remain.

A good piece.

I am still sticking with my thought experiment on Mexico, which is looking increasingly plausible.

To the legacy society of the nation-state and the hierarchical transnational corporation:

MILESTONE

….It’s time to up the ante and move onto the next phase:  the birth and rapid growth of new societal networks.*  This is going to be a fun ride!

* As in, new societal networks that can outcompete (trounce evolutionarily) all existing status quo organizational forms  (this should not be confused with the diminutive form of ‘social networking,’ as in Facebook and Twitter).

Long term, I think this is correct and that Robb is, as usual,  ahead of the curve on what will become the zeitgeist in the next few decades ( I will add that this evolutionary path appears to be happening much faster than I had considered, by at least 15-20 years). The movement in the 21st century will be toward networked civilizations on one end of the spectrum that will be pretty nice places to be and on the other, a kind of emergent, hypermobile, barbarism where life is hell on Earth. 

The proper response for existing institutions is to swing their resources, their mass and their remaining legitimacy behind the triumph of the former and gracefully adapt and acclimate rather than be disintegrated by the latter. I considered this in the essay ” A Grand Strategy for a Networked Civilization” that I wrote for Threats in the Age of Obama (p.208):

….Nation-states in the 21^st century will face a complex international ecosystem of players rather than just the society of states envisioned by traditional Realpolitik. If the predictions offered by serious thinkers such as Ray Kurzweill, Fred Ikle or John Robb prove true, then  technological breakthroughs will ensure the emergence of “Superempowered Individuals”[1] on a sizable scale in the near future.  At that moment, the reliance of the State on its’ punitive powers as a weapon of first resort comes to an end.  Superemepowered individuals, separatist groups, insurgents and an “opting-out” citizenry will nibble recalcitrant and unpopular states to death, hollowing them out and transferring their allegiance elsewhere.

While successful states will retain punitive powers, their primary focus will become attracting followers and clients in whom they can generate intense or at least dependable, loyalty and leverage as a networked system to pursue national interests.  This represents a  shift from worldview of enforcement  to one of empowerment, coordination and collaboration. States will be forced to narrow their scope of activity from trying to supervise everything  to  flexibly providing or facilitating core services, platforms, rule-sets and opportunities – critical public goods – that the private sector or social groups cannot easily replicate or replace.  Outside of a vital core of activity, the state becomes an arbiter among the lesser, interdependent, quasi-autonomous, powers to which it is connected.”

In other words, America and our “leaders” need a Boydian strategy and a ruthless commitment to honest clarity and sacrifice in order to weather the transition and retain some relevance. This is what makes the current cultural trend toward a political economy of oligarchy among the elite so worrisome. Their careerist self-interest and class values will push them to make all the wrong choices at critical junctures.