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MORE ON SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR FORCE

Dr. Barnett gave my post on Leviathan vs. System Administrator Force a nice plug . It’s a wonderful experience to bounce ideas back and forth like this – perhaps poli sci is the route to go for doctoral studies ! It’s very much unlike the give and take among historians which often tend toward adversarial debates over causation – when things don’t degenerate into ” gotcha ” charges over standards of professionalism or at worst, undisguised, politically-motivated, personal attacks.

In any case, I’ve been pondering what System Administrator Force should be and it occurred to me that it might be helpful to consider what it should not become – poorly armed, inadequately supported, overly restricted duplicates of UN peacekeepers. The experience of the Dutch peacekeepers in the Balkans or the impossible position of General Romeo Dallaire’s UN command in Rwanda must never be repeated.

A System Administrator Force could enter a nation on a possible situation continuum ranging from an anarchic failed state ( Somalia, Haiti) , in the aftermath of Leviathan ( Afghanistan, Iraq) to reluctant cooperation with the sovereign government under international pressure ( Cambodia, East Timor, Kosovo) or by invitation. Their role is to wield force in a manner which creates a security zone in which humanitarian, infrastructure and political problems can be addressed – initially by the System Administrator Force if required but increasingly by NGO’s, international agencies and the citizens of the state themselves.

System Administrator is a protector, mentor and coordinator but to be effective in these roles System Administrator soldiers and personnel must deploy as an effective military organization and not as lightly-armed potential hostages to the forces of disorder. The warrior aspect, while more muted than with Leviathan, must be in Dr. Barnett’s words ” robust “. They aren’t there to suppress a major national rebellion but they should be able to deal with pockets of bitter-enders, snipers, bandits, thugs and the occasional, large-scale urban riot. The posture generally is that of the MP or the combat engineer rather than the Ranger or airborne trooper – these people arrive in the Gap combat-ready but that’s not their primary mission.

Max Boot, who had a slightly different but not unrelated argument in mind in his The Savage Wars of Peace did a very successful job of providing numerous examples of the U.S. military, the Marines in particular, acting as a System Administrator Force. They fought guerrillas but in ” Small Wars ” they also did the ” Big Chores ” of nation-building. They frequently set up modern sanitation, built roads and schools, established police services, provided clean drinking water and even in some cases – notably Cuba, Germany and Japan – forced a revision of the social contract. Some of these things are more important than they appear – few things can dramatically change a nation’s demographic future than a wide-scale shift to potable water or access to rudimentary medical care.

Given the nature of bureaucratic longevity, it is most likely that units of the current military services will be organized into a ” System Administrator Force “on an ad hoc basis, attempting to implement the principle behind that concept through greater cooperation with NGO’s and other departments of the USG. The learning curve is apt to be steep, as Iraq has demonstrated though the power of that example is going to fuel the will within the officer corps to avoid another ” Iraqi occupation ” the next time around.

ZARQAWRI IN IRAN ?

Middle East Newsline, which I believe is Israeli sourced, is reporting that Islamist terrorist Abu Mussib al Zarqawri is operating from the Iranian side of the Iran-Iraq border. I find this somewhat unlikely, given Zarqawri’s noted hostility toward Iraqi Shiites, that Iran, even the hardliners, would select him in particular as their Sunni catspaw of choice. Unlike Juan Cole I don’t find prospects of Iranian cooperation with Sunni terrorists impossible; in fact in the case of the Palestinians there is good evidence that this has been going on for years. Iran itself admits to having senior al Qaida figures in some kind of vague custody, though not to helping them directly.

This is difficult to decipher. Iran’s government is much like that of a schizophrenic with multiple personalities – while the hardline Shiite Islamists under Khameini, Rafsanjani and the Security services are dominant, the decision-making process of the leadership is convoluted.

THOSE WHO SEEK DISCONNECTION – COMBATTING THEIR STRATEGY

Just as statesmen craft strategies to deal with other states and advance national interests, would-be revolutionaries have occasionally put down their objectives in pursuing the destruction of the established order. In Iraq, we seen insurgents using one of the oldest techniques of terror, organizing through a leaderless network of interdependent ” cells” that become self-sustaining systems of recruitment, action and mythic political propaganda. Some examples of strategists of disconnection:

Catechism of a Revolutionary

The Al Qaeda Documents

The al Zarqawri Letter

Mao’s Red Book

Mein Kampf

The Modern Prince

God and the State

The Possessed ( Dostoyevskii, fiction)

The Turner Diaries ( fiction, inspired several Neo-Nazi terrorist groups)

In many historical cases, once these networks have proliferated to a certain point of critical mass the revolution either succeeds or they are thwarted by the advent of equally lawless, competing, self-sustaining, systems, usually referred to by supporters of revolutionary causes as ” death squads”, ” white terror ” or ” war lords “. In reality, these private paramilitaries are more or less morally identical to the revolutionary terrorists in terms of operational practices and organization – they eschew any traditional constraints of the laws of war or the Geneva Convention and commit atrocities against the supporters of revolution( real and imagined) in hopes of disrupting the terrorist movement itself. They are often quite successful in putting a serious dent in the aspirations of revolutionary movements.

While the government gains an advantage in sponsoring a competing network of terror by leveling the playing field it assumes a number of risks. First is that the atrocities committed by the paramilitaries will be attributed to the government by citizens and foreign states causing the terrorists to gain political support and sympathy. Secondly, this practice marks an escalation from a stage of conflict of limited insurgency to that of a general civil war with a rapid increase in human and economic costs and increasing risk of foreign intervention. Thirdly, is the problem of ” Blowback ” where the paramilitaries and terrorist movements alike evolve out of all control, mutate into new and more violent manifestations and the nation descends into a generalized chaos of a failed state.

Alternatively, the state can also opt to fund peaceful but political self-sustaining systems like political parties, trade unions, civic associations, newspapers, charitable groups in an effort to strengthen and immunize civil society against the forces of disconnection and terror. In the meantime, the state continues to wage war on the insurgency, retaining the legal monopoly over the use of force. This is what the CPA should have pursued during the past year in Iraq but failed to do so, among many other important tasks left undone.

At the moment, Iraq seems to be teetering on the brink of sliding into a generalized civil war. Counter-terror groups have made shadowy but minor appearances first against the Sadr militia then in a videotaped threat against the Islamist terror-master al Zarqawri but a commitment to taking that route in earnest has not yet been made. It’s apparently a possibility and one that would be instantly formidible if a deal is cut with the Kurdish Peshmergas and moderate ex-Baathist security personnel. If the U.S. were to pull out of Iraq preciptously in the near future it’s highly likely that Iraq’s interim government will be forced to take this step, lacking any other credible military options.

CAERDROIA TALKS STRATEGY

Jeff at Caerdroia has a hard-hitting post on strategy and why the Democrats do not have one for the War on Terror. It’s excellent.

I’m hoping that, eventually, the Democrats return to being the party of Truman and JFK because it’s not good for one of the two parties to be in the grip of declinist, defeatist, transnational progressive doves. The convention in Boston was, in terms of style at least, a nod away from that direction and toward political reality but I’m under no illusion that having camera shots of Democrats in military uniforms makes the Democratic Party eager to win this war ( or any war) than having Black faces at the GOP convention makes the Republican Party a booster of the NAACP agenda. It’s going to take a generational change of guard, when the Boomers ease out of power positions, for the Democrats to return to the center again.

RAND ON PROMOTING THIRD WORLD MILITARY REFORM – A ” GAP SHRINKING ” POLICY

RAND draws on the example of Eastern Europe retooling their old, Warsaw Pact, military establishments to meet the technological and political requirements of NATO and the EU.