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Narcos Over the Border: Gangs, Cartels and Mercenaries by Dr. Robert J. Bunker (Ed.)

Just received a review copy courtesy of Dr. Bunker and James Driscoll of Taylor & Francis – could not have arrived at a better time given several research projects in which I am engaged.

The 237 page, heavily footnoted, book is organized into three sections: Organization and Technology Use by the narcos networks, Silver or Lead on their carrot and stick infiltration/intimidation of civil society and the state apparatus, and Response Strategies for the opponents of the cartels. Bunker’s co-authors Matt Begert, Pamela Bunker, Lisa Campbell, Paul Kan, Alberto Melis, Luz Nagle, John Sullivan, Graham Turbiville, Jr., Phil Wiliams and Sarah Womer bring an array of critical perspectives to the table from academia, law enforcement, intelligence, defense and security fields as researchers and practitioners.

Looks good – will get a full review here at a later date, but a work that will definitely of interest to those readers focusing on national security, COIN, 4GW, irregular or Hybrid war, terrorism, transnational organized crime and black globalization.

Actually, an article at SWJ with an impressive list of resources on Mexico’s burgeoning cartel war:

Criminal Insurgencies in Mexico: Web and Social Media Resources by Dr. Robert Bunker and John Sullivan

The authors of this piece, individually, collectively, and in cooperation with other scholars and analysts, have written about the criminal insurgencies in Mexico and various themes related to them in Small Wars Journal and in many other publications for some years now. The Small Wars publications alone include “State of Siege: Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency,” “Plazas for Profit: Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency,” “Cartel v. Cartel: Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency,” “The Spiritual Significance of ¿Plata O Plomo?,” “Explosive Escalation?: Reflections on the Car Bombing in Ciudad Juarez,” and “The U.S. Strategic Imperative Must Shift From Iraq/Afghanistan to Mexico/The Americas and the Stabilization of Europe.” Certain truths have become evident from such writings and the raging conflicts that they describe and analyze.

First, the criminal insurgencies in Mexico have been increasing in intensity since the formal declaration of war-penned with the initial deployment of Army units into Michoacán and Ciudad Juárez against the insurgent gangs and cartels-by the Calderón administration in December 2006. Over 30,000 deaths in Mexico, just over ten-times the death toll from the 9-11 attacks, have now resulted from these conflicts with 2010 surpassing the earlier end of year tallies with almost 13,000 total killings. While most of these deaths have been attributed to cartel on cartel violence, an increasing proportion of them include law enforcement officers (albeit many of them on cartel payroll), military and governmental personnel, journalists, and innocent civilians. While some successes have been made against the Mexican cartels, via the capture and targeted killings of some of the capos and ensuing organizational fragmentation, the conflicts between these criminal groups and the Mexican state, and even for neighboring countries such as Guatemala, is overall not currently going well for these besieged sovereign nations. Recent headlines like those stating “Mexico army no match for drug cartels” and “Drug gang suspects threaten ‘war’ in Guatemala” are becoming all too common. Further, it is currently estimated that in Mexico about 98% of all crimes are never solved-providing an air of impunity to cartel and gang hit men and foot soldiers, many of whom take great delight in engaging in the torture and beheading of their victims.

[ by Charles Cameron ]

It’s a very different approach…

I’ve been preparing to write up some of the episodes that represent how warm and close relations between Muslims and Christians can at times be – the meeting of St Francis with the Sultan Malik al-Kamil, the period of considerable tolerance and artistic flourishing under Umayyad rule in Cordoba – and I have to say I’m getting very impatient to see this film:

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If you would like to understand why the Qur’an (5:82) says:

The nearest to the faithful are those who say “We are Christians. That is because there are priests and monks among them and because they are free of pride.”

May I recommend you either read John Kiser’s The Monks of Tibhirine: Faith. Love and Terror in Algeria — or, when it opens in your part of the world, go see Of Gods and Men. Or both.

Wishing us all peace in the new year, decade, century…

Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice

SWJ Blog has been featuring Octavian Manea talking to COIN experts about counterinsurgency godfather David Galula:

Interview with Dr. John Nagl

“Counterinsurgencies are after all learning competitions.”

What is the legacy of David Galula for US Counterinsurgency doctrine? Is he an intellectual father?

The most important thinker in the field is probably Mao whose doctrine of insurgency understood that insurgency is not a component or a precursor of conventional war but could by itself accomplish military objectives. The greatest thinker in my eyes in COIN remains David Galula who has the enormous advantage of having studied and seen the evolution of insurgency in France during WW2, then spending a great deal of time in Asia, and really having thought through the problem for more than a decade before he practiced COIN himself for a number of years. His book is probably the single biggest influence on FM 3-24, the COIN Field Manual. David Galula is the best COIN theoretician as Kennan was for containment.

Interview with Dr. David Ucko

What was the role of David Galula in shaping the mind of the US Army or the Army Concept? Could we see him as an intellectual founding father? And what specific beliefs do you have in mind when you assess his role in shaping the organizational culture of the US military?

As certain individuals and groups within the US military again became interested in counterinsurgency, this time as a result of the persistent violence in ‘post-war’ Iraq, one of the more immediate reference points for how to understand this type of political violence were the scholars and theorists who had marked the US military’s previous ‘counterinsurgency eras’, during the 1960s primarily, but also during the 1980s. In the former camp, the thinkers of the 1960s, David Galula stands as an intellectual forefather to much that was finally included in the US Army and Marine Corps’ FM 3-24 counterinsurgency field manual; indeed I believe his book is one of the three works cited in the manual’s acknowledgements. I think it is fair to say far fewer people have read than heard of Galula, and it would be an interesting study to go through his writings more carefully and see to what degree they apply to our understanding of counterinsurgency today. Nonetheless, even at a cursory level, Galula has been extremely helpful in conceptualizing some of the typical conundrums, dilemmas and complexities of these types of campaigns: the civilian capability gaps in theater; the political nature of counterinsurgency; the importance of popular support, etc. These were issues that US soldiers and Marines were confronting in Iraq and struggling to find answers to; Galula’s seminal texts were in that context helpful.

In terms of influencing US counterinsurgency doctrine, perhaps one of Galula’s main contributions is the emphasis on the political nature of these types of campaigns, and – importantly – his concomitant warning that although the fight is primarily more political than military, the military will be the most represented agency, resulting in a capability gap. Galula’s answer to this conundrum is explicitly not to restrict military forces to military duties, a notion picked up on in US doctrine, which also asks the US military to go far beyond its traditional remit where and when necessary. In a sense, this line of thinking is one of the greatest distinctions between the Army’s first interim COIN manual in 2004 and the final version in 2006: in doctrine (if not necessarily in other areas, such as force structure), Galula’s view of military forces filling civilian capability gaps had been accepted. Of course, it should be added that all of this is much easier said than done, and perhaps some of the implications of involving military forces in civilian tasks (agriculture, sewage, project management) have not been thoroughly thought through – do the armed forces have the requires skills, the training, and how much civilian capability can one realistically expect them to fill? Also, the danger with following Galula on this point is that by doing what’s necessary in the field, the armed forces may also be deterring the development of the very civilian capabilities they reluctantly usurp.

How relevant is Galula’s “Maoist Model” of insurgency anymore?

It is certainly possible for a Maoist insurgency to be successful in today’s world under the right conditions. This was proved, ironically, by Maoists in Nepal who managed to shoot their way, if not into power, into a peace agreement with other Nepalese political parties who united with the Communists to topple Nepal’s monarchy in 2006. Conditions were nearly ideal for an insurgent victory: Nepal is a poor, isolated, landlocked nation which had an unpopular and tyrannical king who was, at best, an accidental monarch; and who lacked an effective COIN force in the Royal Army. Nor was India, which passed for the Royal Nepal goverment’s foreign patron, willing to consider vigorous military intervention or even military aid sufficient to crush the rebellion. For their part, the Maoists were highly disciplined with a classic Communist hierarchical system of political-military control and were relatively-self-sufficient as a guerrilla force.

How well does such a “Maoist Model” of revolutionary warfare reflect conditions of insurgency that we see today in Mexico, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia or Yemen? Or in central Africa? 

Not very well at all.

For that matter, how relevant was “the Maoist Model” for Mao ZeDong in actual historical practice as opposed to retrospective mythologizing and theorizing that lightly sidestepped the approximately 4 million battlefield casualties inflicted on Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists at the hands of the Imperial Japanese Army? Prior to the invasion of China proper by Imperial Japan, Chiang Kai-shek’s “extermination campaigns” had a devastating effect on Mao’s forces and had Chiang been free to concentrate all his strength against the Communists, it is difficult to see how Mao’s revolution would have survived without significant Soviet intervention in China’s civil war.

If David Galula were alive today, I suspect he’d be more interested in constructing a new COIN model from empirical investigation than in honing his old one.

John Seely Brown, who is the co-author of The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion along with blogfriend John Hagel and Lang Davison, is primarily speaking about education and learning in an ecological paradigm.

Note to self: I need to read this book.

That said, “pull” is the fulcrum for all 20th century orgs that hope to adapt to the 21st, not just public education. Hierarchies, including states, can no longer completely dominate, only aspire to generally arbitrate, or concentrate their powers in an asymmetric fashion. To do this, over the long term, requires putting  attracting the allegiance of clients and allies capable of taking independent initiative in harmony with the org’s vision rather than relying primarily upon coercion to force people to mechanistically follow orders.

Not sure that too many people in our hallowed institutions “get it”.