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[ by Charles Cameron — complex situations, unexpected consequences, analysts’ need for semi-random knowledges ]
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Suppose you’re a Japanese journalist given a news report to write about a tourist who may have contracted an obscure disease on a visit to Zaire. The job seems straightforward enough, you expect your Japanese readers to be sympathetic to the plight of your Japanese tourist subject, you don’t exactly expect your readers to include one Shoko Asahara, guru of Aum Shinrikyo…

But he’s there in the penumbra, reading… as this report from the Center for Counterproliferation Research of the NDU testifies:

In 1992, Aum sent a team of 40 people to Zaire to acquire Ebola. Led by Asahara himself, the team included doctors and nurses. During an outbreak of Ebola in Zaire, a Japanese tourist visiting that country may have contracted the hemorrhagic fever. This report, which received considerable publicity in Japan, apparently inspired Asahara to mount the expedition to Zaire in October 1992. Ostensibly, this trip was intended as a humanitarian mission, called the “African Salvation Tour.” It is not known if Aum actually obtained Ebola cultures. A Japanese magazine quoted a former member of the group, “We were cultivating Ebola, but it needed to be studied more. It can’t be used practically yet.”

One things leads to an unexpected other.

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Here’s a positive example, one that I heard on the radio yesterday, and nothing to do with terrorism — except perhaps at the cellular level:

You know, the Scottish surgeon George Beatson was walking through the highlands in England, and he heard some shepherds saying, oh, you know, when we remove the ovaries of cows and goats, the pattern — or the breasts of these animals changes; the pattern of milk production changes.

So, Beatson began to wonder, well, what is the — this was a time when no one knew about estrogen. So, Beatson began to wonder, what is the connection between ovaries and breasts? And he said, well, if ovaries are connected to breasts, then maybe they’re connected to breast cancer.

And he took out the ovaries of three or four women with breast cancer and had these spontaneous, had these, not spontaneous, but amazing remissions. And it was — this is the basis for tamoxifen, the drug that actually blocks estrogen, and thereby affects breast cancer.

I mean, who would have thought that walking through and talking to a shepherd in Scotland would affect a billion-dollar drug, which is very, very powerful against breast cancer today?

One thing leads to an unexpected other.  Listen.

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Back to terror — and what jihadists notice, think about and discuss:

They follow the news.

If the stock-market takes a dive, the folks on the forums know about it — and crow about it.  Because, as bin Laden said, AQ’s policy is one of “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy, Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah.” Inspire magazine calls it “the strategy of a thousand cuts” and claims the “aim is to bleed the enemy to death”.  Daveed Gartenstein-Ross‘ book, Bin Laden’s Legacy, is abundantly clear on that point.

So yes, they follow the news.  So they know about the riots in the UK.

There was an interesting short flurry of tweets on Twitter a couple of days ago, when Will McCants, who monitors such things and runs the Jihadica blog, noted: “Lots of pictures of #londonriots being posted to Ansar jihadi forum” and followed up by quoting a couple of forum comments: “God is burning the ground beneath the feet of the Crusaders” and “We are witnessing this aggressor nation quaking inside and out….collapsing and suffering defeat by the permission of God”.

Jason Burke of the Guardian picked up on McCants’ post and noted, “so now Islamic militants exploiting #londonriots” – and Aaron Zelin of Jihadology chimed in with the tweet I quoted at the top of this post.

The conversation continued for a bit, but it’s Aaron’s comment that I want to focus on, because it makes explicit the kind of seamless weave of knowledge that I’ve been thinking about lately — which makes cross-disciplinary awareness both so necessary and so feasible at this time.  Let’s call it Zelin’s law:

every event and issue will be exploited by every group and ideology on the net.

Here’s my corollary: one thing leads to an unexpected other.

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So what?

So we need a supersaturated solution of knowledges where decisions are made.

So our analysts need to be speckled specialists — experts with a sufficiently wide and random assortment of additional odd knowledges to be able to frame and reframe and reframe, to shake off any group frame and suggest half a dozen plausible alternatives, to doubt each one of them in turn, to turn to the right people who are themselves specialists in those other framings, to ask, to listen, to hear…

So we also need a supersaturated solution of ignorances — admitted, and inquiring.

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Here’s Herbert E Meyer on the non-bureaucratic qualities of first-rate analysts:

In normal circumstances people like this would never be willing to take government jobs. Moreover, any agency that hired them would soon be driven nuts by their energy, their drive, their seemingly off-the-wall ideas, their sometimes bizarre work habits, even their tempers.

Sometimes bizarre, eh?  “Embrace the maverick,” Deputy Director for Intelligence Jami Miscik advised.

And by extension, embrace the unexpected — learn to expect it.

Is there a literature of the unexpected? Read it! And I don’t just mean read Nicholas Nassim Taleb‘s Black Swan — I mean, keep tabs on the undertows, read the opposition, read the factional fights within the opposition, read the underclass and upperclass, the radical and the pacific and the merely eccentric and the totally off the wall.  Know that some people believe there is a reptile in Queen Elizabeth II‘s head — and I don’t mean people who hold some variant on Paul MacLean‘s triune brain theory!  Read the ancients as well as the moderns.

Note especially the places where two fields or perspectives or framings overlap — they’re the places where experts can most easily see that each others’ approaches have value.  Cultivate binocular vision — and I mean, vision.

And do all this with a fair amount of randomness, with curiosity.

I happen to study religion, for instance, and splatter myself with other things — epidemiology, for instance, and complexity, and lit crit, and medieval music and plenty more besides — just enough to give a vaguely Jackson Pollock look to my interest in religion.

And Aum Shinrikyo’s attempt to gather samples of the Ebola virus isn’t an epidemiology story, isn’t a new religious movements story — it’s at the intersection, it’s both.

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How many fields of knowledge can you gossip in for a minute or three? That’s a question with profound implications in terms of networked interactions and collective understanding.

How many languages can you frame your questions in?

[ by Charles Cameron — religious knowledge, foreign policy, military ]

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Dr. Douglas M. Johnston just posted a piece titled Religion a crucial tool in U.S. foreign policy in the Washington Post’s On Faith blog, and in it he quoted Dr. Sebastian Gorka‘s recent testimony to the HASC Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities:

It is very difficult, if not impossible, to provide the contextual knowledge we need to understand and defeat our enemy if we rely solely upon anthropologists and social scientists…. Today our multi-disciplinary analysis of the enemy and his doctrine just as much requires — if not more so — the expertise of the regional historian and theologian, the specialist who knows when and how Sunni Islam split from Shia Islam and what the difference is between the Meccan and Medinan verses of the Koran. We should ask ourselves honestly, how many national security practitioners know the answers to these questions, or at least have somewhere to turn to within government to provide them such essential expertise.

I do appreciate that this was written by Dr Gorka for an audience that needs to keep up to speed on many, many topics.  What dismays me here isn’t the idea that “national security practitioners” should know these things — they should indeed, and should certainly also know specialists who know a great deal more — but that the bar is set so low, “a specialist” being, for that audience, someone “who knows when and how Sunni Islam split from Shia Islam and what the difference is between the Meccan and Medinan verses of the Koran”.

Let’s back up a bit.  Here’s a report on the Senate hearing on the appointment of GEN. Dempsey as Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army.

Gen. Martin Dempsey, tapped by the White House to be the next top military officer, acknowledged Tuesday that he and other senior officers failed to grasp the power dynamics among Islamic-based groups in Iraq.

After the U.S. military toppled the Saddam Hussein-led regime there in 2003, a powder keg erupted that was driven, in large part, by centuries-old power struggles and distrust among Iraq’s various Islamic sects.

It took American civilian and military leaders years to adapt and understand these dynamics, which experts say played a major role in both the length and violent nature of the Iraq war.

Driving the lack of understanding was a tendency of the military to “take five minutes to understand” an issue while immediately spending the next “55 minutes trying to solve it,” Dempsey said during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Those “five minutes to understand” might get you the basic difference between the Meccan and Medinan suras — but a specialist knows a little more than that, as one can gather from comments Dr Timothy Furnish posted just the other day on his MahdiWatch blog, commenting on Dempsey’s remarks:

One might reasonably wonder whether the US military and intelligence community (not to mention the State Department) truly does, finally, realize the importance of sectarian differences in the Islamic world. For example, the Syrian case pitting the pseudo-Shi`i Alawi rulers against the country’s Sunni majority only recently came to Washington’s attention; neither Libya’s history of Sanusiyah Sufi jihad against occupation, nor Mua`amar al-Qadhafi’s heretical Islamic teachings and rule, has been fully considered or acknowledged by the American government; and there are still commanders deploying to and from Afghanistan who seem blissfully ignorant of the fact that that country is 19% Shi`i (and that a substantial subset of that is not Twelver but Sevener, or Isma’ili, Shi`i).

But that’s one paragraph from a single blog post, and Furnish has written a book — has written, as they say, “the book” on Mahdism.  And that’s just one book, you don’t suppose Furnish’s knowledge is limited to what he managed to compress into a few hundred pages, do you?

Furnish is a specialist — that’s why I read and correspond with him.  I’m a generalist with, I hope, some decent insights into what to watch for and who to read for background — but Furnish is a specialist.

And the solution isn’t to add “specialist” to a checklist, find one on LinkedIn and check it off — the solution is widespread, ongoing conversation among specialists, with the help of generalists, across all silos and disciplinary boundaries, of the sort we try to promote here from time to time… until there are enough people, with enough parts of the puzzle, that we don’t get blindsided by our ignorances.

Ignorances, plural.  Knowledges, plural.

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This just in…  Dr Furnish’s second book — The Caliphate: Threat or Opportunity? — is now available for pre-order. I hope to review it at some point here on ZP.

[ by Charles Cameron — analysis of 2083 manifesto, John Robb ]

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Just a quick note — section 3.18 of the 2083 European Declaration of Independence reads as follows:

3.18 “Open source” warfare – clandestine cell systems – the most efficient way of warfare in Phase 1

A clandestine cell structure is a method for organising a group in such a way that it becomes virtually immune to detection, penetration and decapitation. As such, it is a critical strategic element of our operations. It is not in any way lead under a fixed, fragile hierarchy but works as an extremely distributed movement, a resilient network made up of small, autonomous groups or cells. Each group is lead by a cell commander, often working solo, who makes all the decisions based on fixed fundamental principles. We therefore avoid the use of electronic communications (including mobile phones, email and internet chat), because electronic intelligence, signals intelligence, ELINT, SIGINT, is a strength of conventional militaries and counterintelligence organisations.

Solo Martyr Cells are completely unknown to our enemies and has a minimal chance of being exposed. The relatively indestructible and impenetrable nature of the Cell System allows the individual to stay hidden until he is ready to “activate” himself. Even then he will escape the scrutiny often reserved for young men of Arab descent. Optimally he should not have any affiliations to “extremist networks” or to any extreme right wing movements for obvious reasons. This will disallow the National Intelligence Agencies to place the individual on their “radar”/under surveillance. As with the “open source” concept in general our core principles which include armed resistance against the cultural Marxists/ multiculturalists are made available for public collaboration. Our evolving approach to conducting warfare makes it extremely quick to innovate and share tactics rapidly from cell to cell without the direction of a vulnerable leadership hierarchy.

Each European country has tens of thousands individuals who are affiliated with far right conservative movements (from moderate to extreme). In addition, there are several thousand individuals who sympathise with armed resistance groups against the cultural Marxists/multiculturalists (many of them being in the police force and the intelligence agencies themselves).

National Intelligence Agencies have very limited resources and will not be able to monitor tens of thousands of people efficiently (they will not waste excessive resources on individuals who are not considered an immediate threat). They will not have any chance whatsoever to implement efficient means against Solo or even Duo cells because you are not on their “priority watch list”. Even if you are on a watchlist you have several opportunities.

Weaknesses

Groups and individuals who use terror (spreading fear and means of intimidation) as its primary weapon (even if concentrated on specific individuals or government buildings only) will always have limited “open” support in the population.

The rather excessive secrecy and decentralised concept of our command structure can contribute to a reduction or distortion of information about our goals and ideals. This would only be a problem if f. example a cell commander fails to send an announcement to predefined news agencies and blogs. The biggest threat is that media or government agencies might attempt to distort our messages and material and present it to the media as NS or racist in nature in an attempt to de-legitimise us. This has the potential to prevent the wanted effect of our operation, support for our cause and political pressure on current regimes (to halt Muslim immigration and Islamisation). However, if the cultural Marxist/multiculturalist governments attempt to falsely give credit to racist organisations they risk creating more activity among the NS movements so it is a double edged blade even for them.

There appear to be two references to “open source warfare” in the document: this one is the main one, on p. 840 of my downloaded .docx version. There’s also a mention of “open source intelligence”.

I haven’t found a reference to John Robb in this context — but given that John pioneered the concept of OSW in his writings, I will be interested to see his comments on the brief version described above.

[ by Charles Cameron — cross-posted with brief intro from Alix Levine‘s blog — topic: Google’s Summit Against Violent Extremism ]

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Google Ideas — the Google “think/do tank” — recently co-hosted (with the CFR and Tribeca Film festival) a conference on countering radical extremism in Dublin, with a mix of “former extremists, activists, academics, survivors, executives and public sector officials” in attendance.  Blog-friend Matt Armstrong was there, live-tweeting with enthusiasm. Dr William McCants of Jihadica and CNA wasn’t terribly impressed with the outcome, and posted at Foreign Policy:

I am not ready to give up on the enterprise of countering violent extremism just yet, but I am less sanguine about its chances of success than I was before I started working on the problem. Google Ideas’ summit has not increased my optimism, but its resources and potential do.

Alix Levine of Cronus Global attended the event, and reported back on her blog. I’ve commented briefly on McCants’ piece on FP, but wrote a longer piece as a comment on Alix’ blog, and am cross-posting it here in the hope that it will stir further discussion…

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I’m comparing Will McCants‘ response to the Google Ideas conference on FP with yours, and I’m glad you wrote as you did.

McCants – whose work I generally admire — opens his comments by quoting Jared Cohen to the effect that the purpose of the conference was to “initiate a global conversation”. McCants then more or less dismisses the conference itself a couple paragraphs later with the words “If these are indeed the conclusions of the conference, Google Ideas needs more thinking and less doing in its approach”.

Conclusions? How does he get so quickly from “initiate” to “conclusions”?

Okay, we all know that a conference can lead to a volume of proceedings read mostly by the authors themselves and a few aspiring students eager to follow-my-leader and dead end there – but this conference was very clearly intended to be the start of something, not the wrap-up.

So your comment, Alix, “Instead of critiquing Google’s effort, it will be more productive and valuable to work in unison with Google on their mission to ‘initiate a global conversation'” seemed to me to bring us back to the actual intent Google had announced for the conference, and you reinforce that when you write, “I hope that more people will join in on the conversation in a meaningful and (gasp) positive way.”

My questions are: how and where do we do this?

There will have been contacts made at the conference that will lead to an exchange of emails, no doubt – but that’s not a global conversation.

Here are some of the problems I foresee:

(a) siloing: the conversation limiting itself to a few constituencies, each of which talks mainly among its own members, leading to

(b) group think: in which the widely assumed gets even more firmly entrenched as “wisdom”, with

(c) secrecy: meaning that potentially relevant information is unavailable to some or all participants, all of which add up to

(d) blind spots: topics and approaches that still don’t get the attention and exploration they deserve.

The solutions would need to include:

(a) networked diversity: by which I mean a structured means of getting the unpopular or minority opinion front and center (compare business brainstorming in which a facilitator ensures even the “quiet ones” get heard, and that even poor ideas are expressed without critique until a later, evaluative stage),

(b) contrariety: meaning that whatever ideas are “easily dismissed” get special attention, with

(c) transparency: meaning that whatever could be redacted and made partially available is made available, not (as in US Govt “open source” material, closely held), so that

(d) oddballs and outriders get to participate…

Jami Miscik who was Deputy Director for Intelligence at the time, caught my attention when she said in 2004, “Embrace the maverick”. Oddballs aka mavericks make the best contrarians, because they start from different premises / different assumption bases. Miscik accordingly invited science fiction and film writers to interact with her analysts at CIA, and found that when they did, they produced 80% already known ideas, 10% chaff, and 10% new and “valid” scenarios. But even then, “science fiction and screen writers” is a box…

Cross-fertilization, questioning of assumptions, passion, reverie, visualization, scenario planning, play – the number of strategies that could be employed to improve the chances of a successful new insight emerging are many and various – unkempt artists probably know some of them better than suits with high IQs and clearances, and Google clearly knows this, too…

But where?

I mean, what Google+ circles do any of us join, to join this global conversation? What twitter hashtag brings us together under one roof? When’s the follow up in my neck of the woods, or yours?

What’s the method for getting the conversation widespread, well-informed – and scaleable, so the best of the grass roots and local ideas can find their way to the influential and informed, and the best insights of the influential and informed can percolate through to the grass roots and local?

Lastly, I’d like to thank Google for getting a dialog going between those with a range of subjective experiences of radicalization, and those whose job it is to understand and thus be able to interdict it. Demonization never got the situation in Northern Ireland anywhere near peace – listening did.

And thank you too, Alix, for your own contribution. Let’s move the conversation onwards.

Fight in Afghanistan to turn east: Petraeus

The outgoing commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan says the focus of the war will shift in coming months from Taliban strongholds in the south to the eastern border with Pakistan where insurgents closest to al-Qaeda and other militants hold sway.

With a new job pending as the CIA director, General David Petraeus said on Monday that by the northern autumn, more special forces, intelligence, surveillance, air power will be concentrated in areas along Afghanistan’s rugged eastern border with Pakistan….

Commander: Special operations forces under stress

….Senators pressed McRaven on the impact that the planned U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan would have on special operations troops, asking whether Afghan elite forces would be able to step in.

McRaven said that right now U.S. forces need to continue to monitor and guide many of the Afghan special forces, but some units are highly trained and are increasingly taking on a larger role.

While the number of special operations forces has doubled to about 61,000 over the past nine years, the total of those deployed overseas has quadrupled. There are at least 7,000 special operators in Afghanistan and about 3,000 in Iraq. Those numbers can vary as units move in and out of the war zone, and often the totals don’t include the most elite of the commandos – special mission units such as Army Delta Force and Navy SEALs that may go in and out more quietly and quickly.

….In Afghanistan, special operations forces serve a number of roles. Not only do they mount an aggressive counterterrorism campaign across the country, but they also form teams to train or mentor Afghan forces. In one example, McRaven said that over the past 12 months, the task force he commanded conducted about 2,000 operations, roughly 88 percent of which were at night….

Supply and demand is an economic principle with universal application.

The demands of war have outstripped our supply of tax dollars, so elite units of speed, stealth and striking power are being substituted, in synergy with airpower, paramilitaries and on the spot analysts of the CIA, for whole divisions. In the drawdown from Afghanistan, FID will replace COIN , covert ops will replace surging, class will replace mass.

Mass in an AVF is very, very expensive (so is, incidentally, choosing grandiose political objectives to be achieved by military means). The shift that is happening in Afghanistan, partly by fiscal necessity, is going to become our default defense paradigm for at least the 2010’s. Highly mobile, extremely fast, networked, partially covert, backed by lethal high-tech firepower.

Rumsfeld’s revenge. And Wild Bill Donovan’s. And Art Cebrowski’s.

As a rule, I think recreating a modernized OSS-like community in all but name is a good idea that will pay dividends in terms of tactical and strategic flexibility. I fully expect the bureaucratic gravitational pull and sheer utility in fighting the murky, mutable, Islamist enemy to eventually draw in cyber elements of various agencies, elite law enforcement, DOJ, DARPA, Treasury and State Department personnel in to the mix, albeit sparingly. Such an interdependent and collaborative military and intelligence community is optimized as a striking force against our most immediate or proximate security threats – though definitely not all of our security threats (those who wish to disband all our armored units or unilaterally give up nuclear weapons can stop fantasizing now).

However, there are some caveats that need to be considered, in my view.

First, supply and demand applies here as well.  There’s a high practical barrier to growing the size of our special forces, which are presently badly overstressed. The commonly cited figure for growth is 3-5 % annually, if we want something better in our special forces than the highly conditioned thugs that the Soviets used to roll out in large numbers in their SPETSNAZ divisions. That’s not much and it represents the max that is probably possible without returning to conscription, which theoretically would give the US military the pick of the litter of entire age cohorts, but in reality much less. You have to be highly motivated to become a Navy SEAL or want to jump out of a perfectly good Army helicopter. Unwilling conscripts won’t fit the bill. Right now we are “stretching” our special forces by mixing them with high quality regulars; a hidden cost to this practice is that most of these folk are essentially “officer material” and drawing out the most capable personnel systemically weakens the regular units of their natural leaders.  The tip of this shadowy spear is always going to be small and difficult to replace and not something suited for waging total war (shades of Byzantium).

Secondly, normal use of this kind of force requires a political climate that keeps the antiwar and anti-American factions of the Left marginalized because many operations in the blurry realm between war, terrorism, crime and covert ops will legally require presidential findings to be reported to Congressional oversight committees. If the US Congress had the political composition of the 1980’s, with Vietnam era anti-war types being extremely vocal, especially in the House, much of what we are doing and have done in Afghanistan, Pakistan or Yemen would not be politically possible, including the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. It would require a considerable electoral turn, but friction in the form of modern day Boland amendments, special prosecutors, Church–Pike hearings and gratuitous leaks will make use of these forces impractical and highly risky for any president. Or for the military and intelligence personnel themselves who might face ex post facto prosecution due to the agitation of zealous leftist partisans in Congress and the media.

Thirdly, an emphasis on a special forces dominant force structure may have the unintended consequence of causing the executive branch civilian officials to move even further away from strategic thinking and incline them more toward reactive, tactical, retaliation. Misuse of special forces is the American historical norm.  Special forces are so well suited for “emergency use” that they are frequently employed for every “priority” mission except those that are intended to have a strategic effect, even when a regular military unit of combat infantry is more than adequate for the task at hand (Or for that matter, using non-military options!) The mental focus and threat awareness starts to unconsciously migrate to those problems such a force structure is well-suited to solve and away from those that they are not. Unfortunately, those other security threats might ultimately be a lot more important in the long run to American interests.

America is headed into the Light Footprint Era, ready or not.