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Some astute observations on COIN practice from the founder of Executive Outcomes, Eeben Barlow:

….Governments, despite often being the prime reason why an insurgency starts, are often only too keen to make the armed forces responsible for establishing workable governance in areas that have become positively disposed towards the insurgency.

As it is an internal problem, countering the insurgency is essentially a law enforcement responsibility. The problem is that often the law enforcement agencies do not realise that an insurgency is developing and through ignorance and denial, mislead government – and the nation – on the seriousness of the situation. This provides the insurgents with numerous advantages, most crucial being time to organise, train and escalate the insurgency.

The end goal of the insurgency is political in nature and therefore, the main effort aimed at countering it ought to be political and not militarily. This “passing the buck” approach places the armed forces in a position they can seldom if ever win as the military’s role is not to govern but to ensure an environment in which governance can take place.  

An insurgency is neither a strategy nor a war. It is a condition based on the perception(s) of a part of the populace that poor governance exists, that government only governs for its own benefit and that they – the populace – are being marginalised or politically suppressed. In reality, an insurgency is an internal emergency that, left unchecked, can develop into a civil war. The insurgency itself is a means to an end and it is an approach aimed at either weakening or collapsing a government’s control and forcing a negotiation in the favour of the insurgents.   

[ by Charles Cameron — finding feedback loops in blindspots, truths in symbols, strength in ideas ]
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photo credit: Mobile News UK

It is in the nature of analogical thinking that it moves sideways, or more precisely, in honeycomb fashion, rather than forwards — and so it is that my just completed post It’s an abomination! leads me to two other considerations:

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My first is to compare the situation of the Pakistani gentleman preparing and selling flags for burning —

The man who dominates much of the supply chain of American flags to religious groups, 30-year-old Mamoon-ur-Rasheed – who’s been publishing anti-American placards and hand-made stars and stripes since his school days, when he was angered by the Clinton administration’s sanctions on Pakistan following its nuclear weapons testing in 1998 – is now remarkably dispassionate about his services, as well as about the short shelf-life of his flammable goods.

“We work hard for our product, and we get paid for our product,” says Rasheed, clad in a camouflage baseball cap and seated behind a desk that takes up most of the space in his eight-by-six-foot office in Gulashan-e-Iqbal, one of the city’s oldest working class neighborhood.

“So what if it burns? The purpose of the flag is to last for an hour. It’s unfortunate, but if the demand is for an hour, then the supplier must meet such demand too,” he says.

— with the no less entrepreneurial fellows in Cambodia who capture birds for the express purpose of selling them to those who wish to set them free:

Merit release — procuring animals that are about to be slaughtered and releasing them back into the wild — is a tradition practiced, to different degrees, by various Buddhist groups each year. It sounds like a good — and yes, meritorious — idea, but you might want to think twice before trying it. Why?

Well, as Conservation Magazine reports, hundreds of thousands of birds are caught in Asia each year just so they can be bought for merit release, putting them through the unnecessary stress of catching them just to be set free again. But there’s more. Many of these birds are infected with avian flu virus and other pathogens, and they can infect other birds, animals and people when they’re released. According to the study, published in Biological Conservation, 10 percent of the Cambodian birds the researchers tested were infected with avian influenza. “The presence of pathogenic viruses and bacteria among birds available for merit release is a concern both to wild bird populations and to humans involved in the trade,” the authors write.

The lesson here being that there are always more things going on than catch the eye, and that feedback loops in your blindspots are liable to getcha…

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My second is to compare Coleridge‘s observation about symbols:

On the other hand, a Symbol is characterized by a translucence of the Special in the Individual or of the General in the Especial or of the Universal in the General. Above all by the translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal. It always partakes of the Reality it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that Unity, of which it is the representative.

with the quote from Anais Nin that I referenced recently in relationship with Marisa Urgo‘s comment on Zawahiri:

The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic…

And here the moral is that words can at times cut deeper than sticks and stones — in the words of that 2006 National Strategy for CT I just quoted, that winning the War on Terror means winning the battle of ideas — or as another poet, Muriel Rukeyser famously put it, that:

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

Blogfriend, Dr. Venkat Rao had an intriguing post at Tempo (his other blog) on which I want to make a few, relatively disjointed, observations:

Positioning Moves versus Melee Moves 

My general philosophy of decision-making de-emphasizes the planning/execution distinction. But I am not an agility purist. Nobody is. You can think of the Agility Purist archetype as a useful abstraction. This mythical kind of decision-maker believes that a mind and personality that is sufficiently prepared for a particular domain (say programming or war or biochemistry) needs no preparation for specific situations or contingencies. This magical being can jump into any active situation in that particular domain and immediately start acting effectively.

At the other extreme you have an equally mythical Planning Purist archetype who has thought through every possible contingency all the way through the end and can basically hit “Start” and reach a successful outcome without further thinking. In fiction, this is best represented by jewelry heist capers based on long, involved and improbably robust sequences of moves, as in Ocean’s Eleven or The Italian Job. A few token things go wrong, but overall, these narratives play out like Rube Goldberg machines. 

What is interesting to me is that if we look at historical figures who epitomize a “purist archetype” they can represent disaster as easily as they can triumph. Take the planner archetype,  for example. Two figures in the annals of warfare who are “purists” in this regard would be Moltke the Elder and Robert Strange McNamara.

Because the Vietnam War was such a terrible debacle and because McNamara’s role in the war was so significant the resulting opprobrium heaped upon McNamara (deservedly, IMHO) makes it too easy to forget that he had a brilliant mind, that he was not just a reckless bumbler or a hack as Secretary of Defense. A famous anecdote of McNamara’s intelligence and his ability to quickly grasp enormous reams of data is in The Best and the Brightestby David Halberstam.  As Halberstam related, Secretary McNamara was once over a thousand slides into  being briefed about the war when he abruptly ordered the briefer to stop because the current slide conflicted with the information on something like “slide 23”. They stopped and checked. McNamara was indeed right.

It was McNamara who introduced systems analysis and PPBS to the Department of Defense, created the DIA and the Defense Logistics Agency. Yet despite his methodical and mathematical analytical gifts, his understanding of the human element was a curious lacuna that led to his carefully calculated attrition strategy and escalation. There was no way way, in Robert Strange McNamara’s metrics, to quantify Hanoi’s will to fight, and without such comprehension, attrition would be (to use a popular phrase anachronistically) a “stratergy of tactics”.

Field Marshal Graf von Moltke’s careeer as a war planner and chief of the Prussian general staff was a happier one as the victor in three of Prussia’s wars and a co-founder, with Bismarck, of the German Empire. A devoted student of Clausewitz, von Moltke was at home in the contradiction of exquisite planning and the improvisation that was part and parcel of coup d’oeil in the midst of battle. Unlike McNamara, von Moltke’s planning encompassed the human factors and serendipity. As Antulio J. Echevarria put it:

….Like Clausewitz, Moltke emphasized flexibility in military planning and execution. He eschewed dogmatic thinking, whether tactical or strategic, accepted chance and uncertainty as inseparable from the nature of war, and recognized the often decisive (but incalculable) role that moral factors played in victory. He originally viewed the destruction of the enemy’s main fighting force as the proper aim of war, but gradually became less convinced of its genuine decisiveness after the French resorted to partisan warfare in 1870-71.[10] “We want to believe,” he later told the Reichstag, “that neither the Thirty Years’ nor the Seven Years’ War will recur, but when millions of individuals are engaged in a bitter struggle for national existence, we cannot expect that the matter will be decided with a few victorious battles.”

….By the early 1880s, this free-form approach to war had further established itself as part of the German military tradition, accruing still more Moltkean ideas: simplicity is the essential ingredient of an order; war plans do not endure beyond the first engagement; friction, chance, and uncertainty are inescapable elements of war; and strategy serves policy best when it strives for the highest aim, complete tactical victory.[32] The fact that military writers often accused each other of Schematismus–rigid, prescriptive thinking–in Germany’s turn-of-the-century military debates indicates that Moltke’s ideas had become paradigmatic within the officer corps. Ironically, an inherent contradiction developed in the German view of war at this time–namely, that while war possessed no absolute rules, the destruction of the enemy’s forces had to remain its ultimate aim.

Second, Moltke’s open, inductive approach to war also helped legitimize a decentralized style of warfighting called (perhaps wrongly) Auftragstaktik. Much confusion reigns concerning this concept and its “dubious” historical validity.[34] Military writers on either side of the Atlantic have somewhat abused the term Auftragstaktik in an effort to legitimize their own preferred style of command. In fact, Auftragstaktik and the meaning behind it surfaced decisively, albeit sparingly, in the debate over tactics that raged for years between the Imperial Army’s traditionalists and reformists. In its origins, the concept probably owes more to that leading figure of the Prussian Restoration, Gerhard von Scharnhorst, than to Moltke. But Moltke clearly advocated the decentralization of military effort. He reasoned that war, a product of opposing wills subject to a host of frictions, gives rise to rapidly changing situations that quickly render a commander’s decisions obsolete. Hence, subordinates had to think and act according to the situation, even without or in defiance of orders. While Moltke did indeed promote such a style of command, he did not condone willful disobedience. In fact, the Prussian, and later the German, army maintained strict codes of discipline. 

Back to Venkat:

….In sail warfare, there is a clear distinciton between moves designed to put you in an advantageous position with respect to relatively predictable environmental conditions (primarily the wind direction of course) and moves that are used once an engagement starts.  The latter culminate in a melee: ships next to each other, boarding actions and hand-to-hand combat. It is messy, chaotic and the very definition of the “Fog of War” phenomenon (in the case of sail warfare, cannon fire and the action of fire ships could create a literal blinding smokescreen over everything).

You can think of positioning moves as rich moves based on fertile variablesthat are likely to put you in command of many situations (“own the high ground” is the most famous one). They are high-potential-energy commitments in the space of probable paths. You can also think of them as leverage moves. A crucial feature is that positioning moves involve much less time pressure than melee moves and can be set up well before they are needed. So positioning moves are early, rich moves.

Melee moves on the other hand are, well, the other kind.

I am no naval expert, but the sea like the sky, being free of human clutter and topographic variation, brutally clarifies for commanders and strategists like Mahan or Wohlstetter the relative spatial relationship between adversaries and the limitations of their comparative resources and capabilities in light of distance and time.

If Russia had been a sea, Hitler would have thought twice about Operation Barbarossa.

IQ as a concept (and specifically “g“) and the psychometric instruments used to quantify them has provoked fierce political and scientific debate for decades. The political debate tends to be heatedly emotional and revolve around the inescapably inegalitarian societal implications of crafting policy (education, public health etc.) in light of a wide spectrum of IQ scores being unevenly distributed through the population. Scientific debate tends to be more focused on defining or identifying the parameters of intelligence, the relationship between physical brain structure, cognition and human consciousness,  heritability, neuroplasticity, the accuracy of psychometric instruments and more specialized topics beyond my ken.

What’s usually seldom disputed by scientists is that large differences in IQ are significant and that a very, very small number of individuals – the top 1% to .0001% of the Bell Curve, have unusually gifted and varied cognitive capacities.  It is technically more difficult to measure people who are such extreme outliers with accuracy as their intelligence might very well exceed the parameters of the test. Stephen Hawking’s IQ is frequently estimated in the media to be in the 160’s and Albert Einstein’s in the 150’s but those are speculative guesses. Most of the people touted as being “smarter than Einstein” with astronomical IQ scores, like Marylin vos Savant or Christopher Langan do not (for whatever reason) produce any tangible intellectual work comparable to that of Stephen Hawking, much less Albert Einstein. Maybe we really ought to use that cultural comparison with greater humility until there’s a better empirical basis for it 🙂

[If you are curious what the extremely smart do think about, browse the Noesis journals of The Mega Society]

It is being asserted that any evolutionary improvements to human intelligence are apt to come with (presumably undesired) tradeoffs or deficits. That we are “bumping up against” our “evolutionary limits”. I’m not qualified to evaluate that hypothesis, but it’s assumptions are not stable as advanced societies are already radically changing their cognitive environments as well as approaching the ability to directly manipulate our genetic legacy. Whether it is Kurzweil’s “singularity” or not matters less than these things change the “natural” probability of our evolutionary trajectory. A one in a billion random genetic mutation is no longer so if you can design it in a lab.

How much higher could we push cognition? Or could we expand the existing range by adding a new dimension of senses?

Why would a dictatorship not bound by ethical scruples not do this, even at considerable cost to the individual subjects of such experiments, in order to systematically harness the results of “a genetic arms race” for the benefit of the state? Though a growing body of supersmart people would eventually become difficult to control if your secret police were not intelligent enough to comprehend what they were doing .

The potential economic rewards of increasing human intelligence would inevitably outweigh any risk assessment or ethical constraints.

[ by Charles Cameron — numbers as analytic categories, one, self-reference ]
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Is that a self-eating watermelon?

Not exactly. It’s the ourobouros, the serpent in many mythologies which eats its own tail…

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The thing about one is that it’s itself: as the song says, One is one and all alone, and ever more shall be so.

One is itself, it is self-contained, sufficient — it refers only to itself.

And so it is that all things self-referential have a special quality to them. Douglas Hofstadter recognized this specialness of the self-referential, and made it a feature of his book Godel Escher Bach. And my point in writing this post is simply to say that whenever I as an analyst recognize a self-reference, I pay special attention.

And I am almost always rewarded, either by an aha!, a sigh, or a laugh…

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So for the last two months, I’ve been quietly noting down every self-referential structure in my twitter-stream. Insights, jokes, regrets, they’re all here:

@BryanAlexander, 120508: The trick is to have 3d printers printing 3d printers
@BryanAlexander, 120508: 3d printers all the way down

@tejucole, 120508: Perfectly sane except for persistent paranoia about being sent to an asylum, Miron, 20, of Elizabeth, N.J., was sent to an asylum.

@GEsfandiari, 120509: Kafkaesque Iran where Khamenei’s Fatwa on Antifiltering is Filtered http://www.rferl.org/content/iran_filters_khamenei_fatwa_on_antifiltering_internet/24575143.html

@emptywheel, 120514: MEK, about to be rewarded for its assassination of Iranian scientists, AKA terrorism, by being delisted as terrorists. http://goo.gl/4833u

@carlacasilli, 120515: “By default, Brackets shows its own source code (MIND BLOWN).” How’s that for recursive?

@imothanaYemen, 120529: Paradoxically, I can’t watch @frontlinepbs on Al-Qaeda in Yemen live because I am in Yemen :). Trying to do something about that!

@shephardm, 120612: Think someone has new chapter…Man hitchhiking across US writing “The Kindness of America” hurt in a drive-by shooting

@JimmySky, 120615: #ff @DaveedGR, one of the world’s foremost authorities on foremost authorities.

@DaveedGR, 120707: Ironically, the Brown Lloyd James firm is now in need of its own Brown Lloyd James firm.

@holysmoke, 120709: I wish sarcastic Tweeters would stay classy and STOP SAYING ‘STAY CLASSY’.

@rwhe, 120712: Attention, comedians! How’s “How’s that workin’ out for ya?” workin’ out for ya?

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Each of those very bright fellows noticed a self-reference and thought it noteworthy, worth tweeting on to their various followers. It was the shape they noticed, the form, the way what they were tweeting about turned back on itself, like that proverbial serpent eating its own tail.

And the same shape crops up in scripture and poetry:

Wherefore he saith, When he ascended up on high, he led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men. Ephesians 4:8, KJV — the Vulgate has captivam duxit captivitatem.

One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die! — John Donne, Holy Sonnets, X.

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Self-reference is an important analytic signal: pay special attention. It doesn’t tell you what kind of attention, or why it might be important, just that there’s something worth looking at. A data point, possibly an anomaly.

That’s the number one thing to note.

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I am eager to know what sorts of insights you can derive from or find echoed in this series of posts.