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Blogfriend Michael Tanji weighs in on my “Orientalism” post with the bureaucratic facts of life:

Don’t misconstrue what HUMINT is about though. This is not the FBI and the goal is not to turn Bob Smith into the Islamic Donnie Brasco; the goal is to become the guy who meets, befriends, and manages the Donnie Brascos. Regardless, as tough as some say it is to get into the mix, clearly it does not take a degree in rocket science to make the grade; mostly it is about a willingness to put up with life in the third world.

….A day in the life of an analyst, functionally speaking, is not unlike that of many other cube-dwelling, research/writer-oriented jobs in the world. For a collector though it is in many ways unparalleled in both hazards as well as drudgery. The hazards are fairly obvious, since intelligence work is more or less illegal everywhere; drudgery because for every 30-minute meeting one has there are hours if not days of preparation necessary to help avoid the hazards. Use a car? Gotta document why and where to. Spend money? Gotta document why and who to and how much. Everything requires documentation, which is standard procedure for a bureaucracy, but extremely inconvenient if you are running around the hinterlands with a bunch of guys who would get more than a little suspicious if you started asking for receipts after every meal.

….Setting aside the very real psychological and physical issues involved in such a strategy, consider the equally real bureaucratic issues. This person(s) have to be recruited (creates a file); hired (admin shuffle and more papers to the file); trained far away from N. VA (more expense, admin and paper); and paid (more admin and paper). Now he’s an employee, he’s got all sorts of fun stuff like equal opportunity and ethnic sensitivity training to take, performance evaluations, etc., etc. The system isn’t designed for people or missions like this, so it’s either develop a series of waivers (more admin and paper) or do things off the books (dangerous and, depending on your point of view, more stuff-of-movies).

(In case you were wondering, the references to ‘admin and paper’ allude to both the level of effort involved, the fact that more and more people would know what was going on, and the fact that such a situation invites leaks.)

Read the rest here.

Interestingly, William Lind, who previously has dismissed 5GW as a premature concept, has returned to the subject to dismiss it once again in the context of superempowered individuals. In regard to the spree of crazed gunmen shooting up schools, Lind wrote:

Is this war? I don’t think so. Some proponents of “Fifth Generation war,” which they define as actions by “superempowered individuals,” may disagree. But these incidents lack an ingredient I think necessary to war’s definition, namely purpose. In Fourth Generation War, the purpose of warlike acts reaches beyond the state and politics, but actions, including massacres of civilians, are still purposeful. They serve an agenda that reaches beyond individual emotions, an agenda others can and do share and fight for. In contrast, the mental and emotional states that motivate lone gunmen are knowable to them alone.

The whole “Fifth Generation” thesis is faulty, in any case. However small the units that fight wars may become, down to the “superempowered individual,” that shrinkage alone is not enough to mark a new generation.

Generational changes are dialectically qualitative changes, and those are rare. Normally, a dialectically qualitative change only occurs after time has brought many dialectically quantitative changes, such as a downward progression in the size of units that can fight. In effect, quantitative changes have to pool behind a generational dam until they form so vast a reservoir that their combined pressure breaks through in a torrent. I expect it will take at least a century for the Fourth Generation to play itself out. A Fifth Generation will not be in sight, except as a mirage, in our lifetimes.

In my view, Lind is partially correct in the sense that actions of superempowered individuals – of whom the school shooters in question, mundanely “empowered” by small arms, are definitely not examples – might not be representative of 5GW or even warfare of any kind. Several commenters have previously raised the possibility of nonviolent, constructive rather than destructive, SEI’s. I can also see SEI’s acting in concert with the objectives (peaceful or otherwise) of national authorities to whom they are loyal; or the advent of technologically upjumped “superempowered soldiers” fighting as part of a larger 3GW action by a state military.

On the other hand, while there is no consensus regarding the nature of 5GW, which would have to be an emergent phenomenon, I can’t buy Lind’s a priori dismissal and assertion of a century of 4GW needing to play out first. Frankly, that’s a figure pulled out of thin air. Why not fifty years? Or five ? Or five centuries? Why would the length between generations suddenly get longer between 4GW and 5GW than between 2GW and 3GW when conventional militaries, states and societies would be trying to adapt to 4GW right now ? Why wouldn’t 4GW and 5GW simply overlap for an extended period of time the way 2GW, 3GW and 4GW military forces have and continue to do so ?
If so, SEI’s, successfully attacking national, regional or global systems ought to at least make the cut for consideration as a form of 5GW.

Lind is on target though, in his discussion of alienation as a psychological factor motivating both 4GW forces and hostile SEI’s.  Characteristically, Lind favors a sociopolitical-moral explanation:

This is not to say that the lone gunman phenomenon, and its increasing frequency, are wholly unrelated to Fourth Generation war. They have some common origins, I think.

At the core of 4GW lies a crisis of legitimacy of the state. A development that contributes to the state’s crisis of legitimacy is the disintegration of community (Gemeinschaft). Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the powerful, highly intrusive state, community has increasingly been displaced by society (Gesellschaft), where most relationships between people are merely functional.

That progression has now gone so far that never before in human history have so many people lived isolated lives. I sometimes visualize a conversation between a Modern man and a Medieval man, where the proud Modern says, “You poor man! It must have been terrible living without air conditioning, automobiles, washing machines and hot showers.” The Medieval man replies, “You poor man! It must have been terrible living so alone.”

Isolation and the alienation, anomie and rage that proceed from it fuel both lone gunmen and a broad sense of detachment from the state. Why give loyalty to the state if the society if governs offers nothing but alienation? In turn, alternatives to the state, such as gangs, offer alternatives to isolation as well.

Lind’s analysis here is rooted in a philosophical tradition for which Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind provides a concise overview and one that probably does not resonate with everyone reading here. One alternative would involve a clinical psychological perspective but in the end, I agree that profound isolation, alienation and disconnection from a larger social network would likely be a common denominator in destructive SEI’s, much like school shooters and lone wolf terrorists like Ted Kacyznski.

John Robb offered a rebuttal of to Lind at Global Guerillas:

 however I do disagree strongly with Bill’s definition of a superempowered individual. Superempowerment is a much richer and more complex phenomenon than a mere reduction in scale (down to a single attacker). Instead, superempowerment describes the process by which individuals and small groups are using;

• rapidly improving tools (the doubling rate of Moore’s law applied to technologies accessible to the average individual),
• connectivity to a global community and its resources (how to use those tools from MIT courseware to Jihadi “how to” sites),
• and newly accessible forms of economic activity that transcend state control,

to radically improve their productivity in warfare. This is definitely a qualitative change in the conduct of warfare, although it is still early. It will become transformational as the technologies of self-replication begin to reach their full potential.

Insofar as SEI’s could be 5GW warriors, I’m pretty comfortable with John’s exposition on the characteristics of superempowerment ( a separate issue from motivation).  You can’t be “superempowered” without some kind of a platform(s) to leverage, adaptively and creatively, against the very complex system of advanced Western society that is providing you with your tools of destruction and decent grasp of what targets could best maximize your leverage. My comment would be that the scalar effect is greater than it seems – as the actor scale is reducing down toward a single individual even as the potential effect of the actor is scaling upward in orders of magnitude to initiate national, regional or even global system perturbations. This too represents a qualitative change.

Addendum:

WHO WOULD DECLARE WAR ON THE WORLD?: THE NATURE OF SUPER EMPOWERED INDIVIDUALS

THE SUPER EMPOWERED INDIVIDUAL

Empowered individuals – and super-empowered ones! 

What Should Superempowered Individuals Do?

Night of the Lone Wolves

Super-Empowered Individuals and 5GW: Heads or Tails
 

The other day I was at the gym working out when I noticed an older but solid looking gent piling an impressive number of plates on the bar. He appeared to be within a stone’s throw of fifty and had an air of a long time lifter about him though if you saw him on the street you might guess that he was a construction worker rather than an aspiring Arnold. The guy was doing barbell shrugs, an exercise for the trapezius muscles where you lift the weight by hunching your shoulders upwards. I watched him a while. He topped out at a little over 900 lbs. The photo gives you an idea of what that kind of weight looks like:

To put this feat in perspective, my personal best in that exercise when I was thirty, in peak condition and considered unusually strong by bodybuilding standards, was the low 700’s!  While shrugging can’t compare to deadlifting in terms of effort, what this gentleman managed was absolutely remarkable. Generally, the only guys who could touch that kind of weight would be accomplished powerlifters or Olympic lifters – large ones – and maybe a few NFL or Big Ten linemen. Maybe. Certainly much bigger dudes than the guy I saw shrugging yeterday.

Inspired by his example, I decided to shrug with 500 today, something I’ve not done in a while. It felt good. Who knows? Maybe when I’m fifty I too will be muscling up almost half a ton.

Abu Muqawama pointed to a LA Times article on the difficulties the CIA is having in getting clandestine officers near actual, real, live Islamists. Not Islamists in Waziristan, Mogadishu or Gaza but near Islamists whose mosque might be down the street from a Starbucks in Rotterdam.

But after spending hundreds of millions of dollars setting up as many as 12 of the companies, the agency shut down all but two after concluding they were ill-conceived and poorly positioned for gathering intelligence on the CIA’s principal targets: terrorist groups and unconventional weapons proliferation networks.  The closures were a blow to two of the CIA’s most pressing priorities after the 2001 terrorist attacks: expanding its overseas presence and changing the way it deploys spies.The companies were the centerpiece of an ambitious plan to increase the number of case officers sent overseas under what is known as “nonofficial cover,” meaning they would pose as employees of investment banks, consulting firms or other fictitious enterprises with no apparent ties to the U.S. government.

But the plan became the source of significant dispute within the agency and was plagued with problems, officials said. The bogus companies were located far from Muslim enclaves in Europe and other targets. Their size raised concerns that one mistake would blow the cover of many agents. And because business travelers don’t ordinarily come into contact with Al Qaeda or other high-priority adversaries, officials said, the cover didn’t work.

Summing up what many considered the fatal flaw of the program, one former high-ranking CIA official said, “They were built on the theory of the ‘Field of Dreams’: Build them and the targets will come.”

Heh. In fairness, the Allen Dulles model of spymastery has its uses. You set up shop somewhere, loudly hint you might have important connections with American intelligence and wait for a variety of shady and desperate characters to walk in your door. This is what Dulles did in Switzerland during WWII and he reaped many a major intelligence coup by getting on to the radar screen of the Abwehr ‘s high-placed cabal of anti-Nazi dissidents. It’s what good CIA station chiefs or their senior staff did regularly and the KGB and GRU did it too. While the embassy staff had to sift through a sea of crackpots, walk-ins nevertheless provided the biggest HUMINT gains for either side during the Cold War

Unfortunately, that tactic only works at a certain level of play. When Ike wanted to work with the French Resistance, Dulles was of little help. The OSS had to get it’s hands dirty and infiltrate agents behind German lines in high risk operations  run by William Casey, another future DCI, using personnel who could blend in with the target population, speak the languages, generally operate without a net. And in so doing, FDR,  Stimson, Marshall and Eisenhower accepted that, every so often, some OSS operations were just going to blow up in our faces (trying to beat Hitler provided a lot of political wiggle room and the media and this nation’s Boomer elite today have attitudes toward covert ops that are 180 degrees different from the GI Generation). Today we are not recruiting, retaining or training enough people with the characteristics that General William Donovan and the OSS once eagerly sought out.

Abu Muqawama used the all-American Matt Damon’s face as a metaphor for the problem. It’s very  true, we need to revise our legacy policies on recruiting children of native speakers and those with extensive overseas experience ( the kind that yields authentic local knowledge, dialectical inflection and street credibility). But take a look at the pasty complexion of  John Walker Lindh, who wandered around Yemen and militant areas of Pakistan prior to joining the Taliban as a mujahid. An American goof with no particular skills except an ingratiating sincerity and mediocre Arabic ended up in the proximity of the world’s most sought after terrorist leader.

Then there is the even more improbable case of Adam Yahiye Gadahn or “Azzam the American”, as he likes to style himself. A partly Jewish son of California Hippie parentage, who once cranked an air guitar to heavy metal tunes, is now al Qaida’s youtube equivalent of Lord HawHaw. At some point, we might want to consider that the Islamist movement and even al Qaida itself are not really “hard targets” in quite the same sense as is North Korea. I have trouble seeing a clueless California teen-ager in 1949 getting to break bread with Josef Stalin at his dacha on the basis of being a Communist and speaking some broken Russian. We are limited here by our own systemic cultural-linguistic ignorance of the rest of the world and our cherished bureaucratic paradigms.

We need to face facts that the USG and it’s IC needs people who speak three or four languages well and can pick up new ones on the fly, if need be. Who are intuitive anthropologists. Who empathize -but do not self-identify with – the cultures in which they immerse themselves. Who have cognitive maps that can integrate different or alien worldviews and profit from them analytically without being transformed by them. We need 21st century “Orientalists” in the mode of Sir Richard Francis Burton, who spoke perhaps thirty languages and knew the cultures from the Nile to the Indus. Impossible ? A friend of mine, trained as a linguist, speaks seven languages, which is very impressive until he relates that his late mentor spoke forty(!), including several dead ones.

The human mind has not changed much since Burton’s day, just our culture and the incentives offered.

“If there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans” – Otto von Bismarck

“I think what we did in Kosovo was profoundly important.” – Bill Clinton

A new nation declared itself today after close to a decade as a UN protectorate; a fragment of a fragment of an extinguished artificial state once built upon the polyglot ruins of European empires and Muslim sultanates. This particular geographic node, Kosovo, has a quality that all of it’s larger forerunners lacked – the cultural unity of identity that will make the nation the primary loyalty of the overwhelming majority of it’s citizens. A fact on the ground that trumps diplomatic protests over the finer points of international law or the mythic appeal of seven hundred year old Lost Causes.

Kosovo’s declaration of independence is ultimately rooted in an overwhelming demographic reality that could have only been altered by Kosovar Serbians having had larger families three and four decades ago than their poorer Albanian neighbors; and the Yugoslavian and Serbian governments having given rural Serbs some kind of economic incentive not to migrate to Belgrade or the larger towns of Serbia proper. As such, Kosovo’s declaration is worrisome to all multiethnic states plagued by separatism where the majority population is in decline – from the windows of the Kremlin, Serbia today must look hauntingly like Russia writ small.

However demographics alone was probably not enough here to explain Kosovo – Kurds, Shan, Tamils, Basques, Tibetans, Palestinians, Uighurs, Baluchis, Pushtuns and in previous centuries, the Irish – all thoroughly dominate their respective homelands but are not yet being welcomed into independence by great powers. What hapened is that the adversaries of the Kosovar Albanian, the Serbians nationalists, also morally de-legitimized themselves under Slobodan Milosevic, with years of atrocities and ethnic cleansing in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Milosevic and his murderous policies had considerable popular support until the very end; they still retain support from a not inconsiderable, defiant, hardcore as evidenced by the inability or unwillingness of Serbia to bring Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic to justice. As the Germans bade farewell forever to East Prussia and Silesia in 1945, Serbians today can reflect on Sarajevo’s impact upon their legal claim to sovereignty over Kosovo.

That being said, events can be handled well or poorly. Kosovar independence would have gone down better in a world where Russia was a prosperous, democratic state, thoroughly integrated into the Core and a regional strategic partner of the United States instead of a bitter, increasingly paranoid, plebiscitary “soft” dictatorship that views America with grave suspicion and the EU with contempt.  That was not an outcome that Washington could have created alone but a relationship that three administrations might have attempted to build with Russia but elected not to do so. Benign neglect mixed with pressure toward Moscow was a deliberate choice on our part, one that might have made Berlin, London and Paris happy in the 1990’s but it wasn’t to our long term strategic benefit.

Independence is good for the Kosovars and in the last analysis, inevitable; but our statesmen should be arranging matters so that the United States profits from inevitable events rather than simply bearing the diplomatic costs.

Kosovo Links:

Coming Anarchy  ,  Duck of Minerva,   TDAXP,  Aqoul,  Outside the Beltway,   Centerfield,   John Robb,  Matthew Yglesias   Catholicgauze – New!,     Weekly Standard -New!

UPDATE:

The United States government has formally recognized the independence of Kosovo via the State Department but, significantly, with an accompanying statement by President Bush.