GETTING OUT A MITRE BOX FOR INFORMATION ANALYSIS
Many thanks to the reader ( whom I’m not sure wishes to be identified) who emailed me the link to MITRE ‘s impressive technology symposium projects page in the wake of my post on OSINT. while I found perusing all of the presentations intriguing, I think the readers will like the following powerpoint briefs the best:
A SUGGESTION THAT FIGHTING A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS WITH THE MUSLIM WORLD IS BEYOND THE MILITARY’S PARAMETERS – AND SHOULD BE
Parameters, the intellectually stimulating quarterly of the U.S. Army War College, has their newest issue available online and it is a good one.
” A Clash of Systems: An Analytical Framework to Demystify the Radical Islamist Threat” by Andrew Harvey, Ian Sullivan, and Ralph Groves.
An interesting piece as it puts the American war against Islamism and Islamist terror networks squarely within the context of globalization and its root nature of being a political conflict whose strategic dimensions are governed by ideoogical imperatives. Explicitly rejecting the ” Clash of Civilizations” thesis of Dr. Samuel Huntington, the authors clearly align themselves with the ideas of Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett – who also rejects the ” Clash of Civilizations” paradigm in Blueprint For Action ( somewhat ironically, Barnett is a former student of Huntington’s). The authors also cite several other of the well known public intellectuals of globalization such as Francis Fukuyama and Thomas Friedman in laying out their model of a ” Clash of Systems” for the war on terror; where Islamism plays the role of violently proposing a radical alternative in terms of political economy to the liberal program of globalization and modernism:
“To Huntington’s disciples, al Qaeda’s strike on the economic and military power base of the United States clearly represents an attack by the Islamic civilization against that of the United States and the West. Such an argument is persuasive, particularly when one looks at the undercurrents of recent events in the Middle East: the ubiquitous Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the vicious campaign being conducted by foreign jihadists against US forces in Iraq, a resurgence of the Islamist ideology across Barnett’s non-integrating gap,17 enhanced violent activity perpetrated by radical Islamist groups across the region, the spread of weapons of mass destruction in the region, and cooperation between regional states and militant groups. Yet Huntington’s thesis fails to capture the true nature of the conflict that currently grips the Middle East. It is not simply a result of irreconcilable differences between Western and Islamic civilizations; it is instead a deeper clash of international systems of order—globalization vs. Islamism.
Under the current system of US-led globalization, a given state has two options—beating the system or joining it. In the Middle East, this debate is raging in an emotional and often violent manner, and it is fast becoming a battle for the soul of the Islamic world. This conflict pits two sides against each other: those who embrace the system—i.e., moderates who seek to reconcile the Islamic culture, religion, and worldview with the benefits of modernization and globalization—against those who would seek to destroy it, personified by Osama bin Laden and other extremists of his ilk, and who wish to replace it with an alternative system, in this case a world guided by the ideology of Islamism.
For Islamists, there are two main targets in their effort to bring about an Islamist system. The United States and its Western allies constitute one target. The other, perhaps more important, is the governments and elites of the states across the Middle East, who walk a narrow tightrope between accepting the dramatic benefits of the global system and heeding the wishes of the majority of the populace who receive little in the way of benefits from their own governments, let alone from the wider global system.
As a result, Islamists are fighting a two-pronged conflict. On the one hand, they have initiated a wide-reaching war against US interests and allies which includes not only direct combat against US military forces, but also attacks like those of 9/11 that target Americans and other Western civilians. Second, in the Middle East the Islamists view the acceptance of a corrupt, godless, immoral system by the civilian populace as being responsible for the Western system’s spread. Consequently Islamists are engaged in a comprehensive battle for hearts and minds.”
If this critique sounds familiar, it is. Essentially it is the analytical argument once raised by revisionist historians like Walter LaFeber and Lloyd Gardner back in the 1970’s and 1980’s in support of 3rd world Marxist guerilla movements. Except this version of the argument has authors that- correctly in my view – favor capitalist globalization and oppose the attempt by Salafist terrorists to stop it. The authors turn the moral argument of the New Left revisionists on its head while accepting major parts of the economic analysis. From that point they proceed to argue that moving the tactical conflict on terror in the direction of Huntington’s thesis, so that Muslims begin to perceive a clash of civilizations, plays to al Qaida’s strategic strengths. 4th Generation warfare theory is not invoked at this point but it could easily have been.
The article is a good example of synthesis and if the authors do not exactly propose anything strikingly new they do weave an effective meta-analysis using a preexisting but current set of powerful themes.
A BOOK REVIEW WORTH READING
The Adventures of Chester has a wide-ranging and informative review of The Shield of Achilles:War, Peace and the Course of History by Phillip Bobbitt. After seeing the selection of topics raised by Mr. Bobbitt and elucidated by Chester – netwar, market-states, ebay-style command systems, PNM, epochal wars – and the impressive people who are themselves reading Shield of Achilles, this may be the next ” must-read” book alongside Blueprint for Action on military strategy, society and foreign policy.
I think I will pencil Border’s into my weekend schedule.
OPEN SOURCE INTELLIGENCE REVIEWED
The latest issue of the CIA’s journal Studies in Intelligence has a couple of articles that demonstrate the advantages and limitations of systematically using OSINT for analysis.
“Reexamining the Distinction Between Open Information and Secrets” by Stephen C. Mercado
Book Review: “Understanding Terror Networks by Mark Sageman” Reviewed by Dwight P. Pinkley
For professional intelligence analysts, OSINT is frequently an underutilized resource due to a need for efficient and systematic aggregation and judicious and precise discrimination among what can often be a massively overwhelming body of information. To make these kinds of selections under time constraints requires both a high level of vertical expertise so the analyst can readily evaluate the significance of the data and a capacity to scan horizontally across fields with acceptable competence. Interestingly enough, Stephen Mercado points to the blogosphere and old media as demonstrating the OSINT equivalent of the ” wisdom of crowds“:
“Quantity: There are far more bloggers, journalists, pundits, television reporters, and think-tankers in the world than there are case officers. While two or three of the latter may, with good agents, beat the legions of open reporters by their access to secrets, the odds are good that the composite bits of information assembled from the many can often approach, match, or even surpass the classified reporting of the few.”
The military appears to be taking the lead with tapping OSINT for intelligence purposes though the existence of a formal system to regularly vet the blogosphere per se is unknown, it would be well within the technical capacity of the NSA to create such a system. It is also extremely probable that IC analysts rely on the internet from time to time, including blogs writtten by those with particular fields of expertise, as do most other researchers these days. There are also, most likely, analysts with a mathematical bent who can discern useful intelligence from studying the memetic network patterns of the blogosphere or make use of those pattern structures for purposes of disinformation strategy ( have to be careful there – you don’t want to corrupt your own feedback loop !).
The review of the Sageman book ostensibly demonstrates the limits over relying solely on OSINT though that is mixed rather heavily with the scholarly limitations of Dr. Sageman, who I’m certain is a top-notch psychiatrist and former CIA field operative but is neither a historian nor an Arabist. The reviewer himself makes an elementary mistake in finding fault with Sageman:
“And there are other problems with Chapter Three. On the one hand, Sageman contends that foreign fighters were barely involved in fighting in the Soviet-Afghan war (57); on the other hand, he stipulates that the leadership and founding members of al-Qa’ida were indeed in the fight “
These two statements by Dr. Sageman I have to note are not mutually exclusive. They also happen to be accurate. Foreign fighters were at best peripheral to the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan but they were present, engaged in firefights that were, if no great strategic importance to the outcome of the war, served as the defining life experience for these “Arab Afghans” themselves.
The IC does not operate under the research constraints that Dr. Sageman labored under regarding OSINT, which should form the base of the analytical pyramid, the context, into which SIGINT, IMINT and clandestinely- acquired HUMINT can be placed and evaluated.
SKETCHING AN IDEA
As I am facing another long day and I’m tired to the point where stringing sentences together with any coherence is proving difficult, I thought I’d try an informal format and see what the resultant reaction might be from the readership. Here goes…..
Deep Influence Networks:
Ideologist ——-> Big Idea:
Conceptual Reorganization within a vertical subfield or domain <--Utility
Horizontal Applications across domains <------ Strong Memetic appeal
Re-Framing old intractable questions
Is Big Idea Zero Sum or Nonzero Sum ?
Simplification vs. Complexity
Cultural universality vs. exceptionality
Conflicting with or reinforcing of dominant societal worldview?
Disciples<-------- Ideologist-------->Patrons
Free-Scale Network builders vs. Free-scale Network providers
Communication Networks <----Big Idea ----> Insider Influencers
( Wide Dispersal )_________________________( Targeted Dispersal)
Passive Acceptance_________________________Active Adherence
Passive Opposition__________________________Active Opposition
Questions:
Allies – discrete category ?
Closed vs. Open system Big Ideas ?
COGNITIVE LINK:
Just for fun, Dan of tdaxp and his grad class in what looks to psych theory.
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