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John Robb is testified today before the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capability on Terrorism and the New Age of Irregular Warfare: Challenges and Opportunities. John put up a PDF of his testimony at Global Guerillas, here is a snippet but you should read John’s text in full:

MY TESTIMONY

….Against this dark picture, a combination of assault by a global economic system running amok and organic insurgency by superempowered small groups, there are few hard and fast recommendations I can provide. It’s complex. However, it is clear:

• We will need to become more efficient. Force structure will shrink. Most of the major weapons systems we currently maintain will become too expensive to maintain, particularly given their limited utility against the emerging threat. Current efforts from the F-22 and the Future Combat System appear to be particularly out of step with the evolving environment. Smaller and more efficient systems such as unmanned aerial vehicles and coordination systems built on open platforms (as in a Intranet) that alloworganic growth in complexity make much more sense.
• We should focus on the local. In almost all of these future conflicts, our ability to manage local conditions is paramount. Soldiers should be trained to operate in uncertain environments (the work of Don Vandergriff is important here) so they can deal with local chaos. Packages of technologies and methodologies should be developed to enable communities in distressed areas to become resilient – as in, they are able to produce the food, energy, defense, water, etc. they need to prosper without reference to a dysfunction regional or national situation. Finally, we need to get build systematic methods formanaging large numbers of militias that are nominally allied with us (like Anbar Awakening, Pakistan’s Frontier Corps, etc.). Even a simple conversion of a commercial “customer relationship management” system would provide better institutional memory and oversight than we currently have.
• We need to get better at thinking about military theory. Military theory is rapidly evolving due to globalization. It’s amazing to me that the structures and organizations tasked with this role don’t provide this. We are likely in the same situation as we wereprior to WW2, where innovative thinking by JFC Fuller and Liddell Hart on armored warfare didn’t find a home in allied militaries, but was read feverishly by innovators in the German army like Guderian and Manstein. Unfortunately, in the current environment, most of the best thinking on military theory is now only tangentially associated with the DoD (worse, it’s done, as in my situation, on a part time basis).

A classy move on John’s part to take the time during his testimony highlight Don Vandergriff’s program of adaptive leadership ( another guy whom Congress should be hearing from)!

 Chairman Ike Skelton (D -Mo), judging by his impressive reading list in military affairs, is a Member of Congress who would seem to be keen to hear what John had to say. I’m very pleased to see Congress drawing upon the insights of strategic thinkers like John Robb and Tom Barnett, instead of the usual parade of niche specialists from the Beltway tanks.

The last global economic crisis of this magnitude helped spread Fascism, Communism and the economic primitivism of State Autarky. I expect that, if a relatively decent bounce-back cannot be engineered to loosen credit markets, we will see countries moving in authoritarian and autarkic directions in 2009, using managed trade barter deals to evade currency fluctuations or devaluations. Black Globalization will explode as ordinary citizens seek to escape new economic controls.

A convenience that, for middle income states, will soon harden into habit with the help of vested interests who benefit, relatively speaking, by reducing social mobility and economic fluidity in hard times.

RARE RETREAD: BLACK GLOBALIZATION AND SMALL WARS

Very seldom do I ever lift something from the archives, but I came across a guest-post I did a number of years ago for blogfriend Josh Manchester at his now defunct The Adventures of Chester blog. The basic content of the post has held up fairly well, though some of the original links that supported the data have since vanished ( reminding me that links are really, really, transient but a footnote is forever); most of the economic data came from NIC/CIA.gov PDFs that have been moved or removed from the web, so take that for what it is worth (the dollar figures are more than stale now, regardless):

“BLACK GLOBALIZATION AND SMALL WARS

When Saddam Hussein emptied his prisons prior to the Iraq War it seemed at the time a sign of his regime’s impending doom. Either Saddam’s amnesty was an act of desperation to shore up support among the Iraqi people or his grip on power had so weakened that he had lost control even over elements of his own security apparatus. In actuality, the dictator had made a preemptive asymmetrical strike against American forces by releasing Iraq’s professional criminals whose well-organized networks badly undermined the CPA and today are connecting an otherwise heterogeneous insurgency. Although this move ultimately did Saddam Hussein little good it demonstrated the potential power that “Black Globalization” has to effect the outcome of military interventions, even those of the United States.

Today, the strategic situation is vastly different. The relative primacy of nation-state sovereigns has been eroded by globalization that opened their economies and borders to greater flows of “connectivity” and challenges to their political legitimacy mounted by international, transnational and subnational actors. Some of these, the WTO or the internet for example, at least have brought tremendous benefits. Not so the metastasis of transnational criminal networks that constitute black globalization and have an economic reach that in the aggregate, rivals the greatest of regional powers and are centered on a few geographic nexus points. A sampling of annual estimates:

Global Narcotics trafficking $ 400-500 billion (matching or exceeding U.S. Defense budget)

Conflict Diamond trafficking $ 24 billion/ 10 % world market

Clearly, the days when even a weak state ruler like Ngo Dinh Diem could scattter a criminal organization with a whiff of grapeshot are over. Expeditions into failed Gap states like Somalia or major military invasions of countries like Iraq must take Black Globalization networks into account during strategic planning as they would subnational or even full-fledged state actors. In terms of on the ground, policy, options for U.S. policy makers and commanders for engaging these networks would include:

The complexity of small wars is almost enough to make diplomats and generals long for the good, old days of the Warsaw Pact. Almost. “