US Army Special Operations Command and Johns Hopkins University/Applied Physics Laboratory National Security Analysis Department have put together a useful reference for small wars students and practitioners entitled “Casebook on Insurgency and Revolutionary Warfare Volume II: 1962-2009.” The resource is available for download in PDF format here. If you are wondering where Volume I is, that government document covers post-World War I insurgencies and revolutions up to 1962 and can be downloaded in PDF here. The original was published by the Special Operations Research Office at The American University in 1962.
Volume II is broken down by conceptual categories as can be seen by the table of contents….
[ by Charles Cameron — British politics and religion: reading billboards as signs of the times ]
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On the Fourth, in my post On the inforced uniformity of religion, I registered my lack of total enthusiasm for a highly-publicized campaign to “declare the plans of heaven” over the British parliament. One of the problems inherent in any such arrangement is the wide diversity of political opinions attributed to the Godhead.
Happily, these days we can quickly ascertain God’s views on matters of religion and politics by watching the signs of the times — billboards:
the Crescent Horde — the endless wave of Islamics who are flocking to our shores to bring our island nations into the embrace of their barbaric desert religion.
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I’m indebted to Archbishop Cranmer, the British blogger on matters of religion and politics, for drawing my attention to each of these billboards (i and ii).
As Abraham Lincoln in a far different context once said: “The prayers of both could not be answered.”
We now have retroactive ROE for enlisted operators so that lawyers can parse chaotic firefights second by second against ex post facto political requirements of our corrupt and useless lotus-eating client, Hamid Karzai. Read Kanani Fong’s post and ask yourself how a vehicle that was deemed a threat in eyes of prosecutors can only have non-threatening occupants who approach American GIs in the midst of combat? WTF?
The initial investigation which blamed “failures of leadership” in the tragic death of Dr. Aqilah Hikmat has been swept under the rug by Army prosecutors.
The senior generals of the US Army are failing in their moral obligation to stand behind our soldiers when they are right and to demonstrate that when they are wrong, that the standards that apply to the least of privates apply equally to the most august of commanding officers:
A few weeks ago, over on Facebook, I shared the tragic story of the accidental death of a female Afghan gynecologist. She had stepped into a battle, where a convoy had not only been bombed, but were engaged in a firefight. I remember scratching my head, thinking about the scores of women who needed her skills, and now they wouldn’t have them. Everyone on Facebook agreed. We were all saddened and troubled. But I also recall thinking that in her snap decision, she underestimated the situation, the danger, and her own mortality. Had she not rushed into the middle of things, she would be alive today. Sometimes you cannot save the world, only yourself and the ones you love. War in itself is messed up. War and politics even more so. The president of that creaky nation called for an investigation. Now, Army prosecutors are bringing charges of negligent homicide against SFC Taylor. His Facebook support page is here: In Support of SFC Walter Taylor Since he’s hired a civilian military defense attorney, a fund has been set up because it’s already wiped out his life savings. Please go here: On Indiegogo: Defense Fund for SFC Walter Taylor Then keep reading. From the L.A. Times:
Imagine your head has just been rocked by the concussive force of high explosive, bullets are snapping around you and the air is thick with the cries of wounded friends. You don’t know where are the enemy is. No officer is giving you orders. You can’t hear properly. Your heart is pounding in your chest. All of you may die in the next few minutes. A black car pulls up and everyone sprays it with bullets. Someone gets out and walks at you….what do you do?
You had far more time reading that passage than SFC Taylor had to make the decision for which he is on trial for his freedom.
RC: I believe that we could have fought this war in a far smarter way. Fighting smarter does not have to involve an existential threat. If the President of the United States and his war cabinet determine that committing US troops and US civilians and American taxpayer money was a critical thing to do for our national security, then I believe the organs of our government had an obligation to employ those resources in the most judicious way possible. You outline a number of problems that I illustrate in the book. Each of the problems you cite has a different cause. Let me take a few of them.
The Marine decision to push for contiguous battlespace – let me say at the outset that this book is not in any way a criticism of the Marines who went to Afghanistan and fought so bravely. They did phenomenal work and I try to capture that in the opening chapters of this book. I recently found out that the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade is going to be awarded the Presidential Unit Citation, an incredibly prestigious award. I think that a reader would determine from their work that I detail in the book that they were deserving of an honor like this. My criticism is with senior officers in the Corps in Washington, as well as our senior Pentagon leadership for sending the Marines where they were sent. There is no argument that Helmand is a bad place; lots of insurgents there. Helmand is the epicenter of poppy production. It was a nasty place, but was it the nastiest place in all of Afghanistan? Was it the most critical place?
Dave is right. The problem of an advanced economy with rentier policies is that economic stagnation is the natural byproduct of managing markets for the benefit of a politically connected oligarchy:
Obama has made science education a priority, launching a White House science fair to get young people interested in the field.
But it’s questionable whether those youths will be able to find work when they get a PhD. Although jobs in some high-tech areas, especially computer and petroleum engineering, seem to be booming, the market is much tighter for lab-bound scientists — those seeking new discoveries in biology, chemistry and medicine.
The smartest math PhD I know is working at, essentially, the same job as he held before he got his doctorate, working as a computer programmer. Outside of a handful of fields, e.g. petroleum engineer—a field that produces fewer than 300 new graduates with bachelors annually from just a handful of programs nationally, or biomed, enormously subsidized, there just aren’t a lot of jobs out there. Even biomed is shrinking:
I think they used to call some of this “network-centric” in the old days: 🙂
….though most don’t associate computer networks with special operations forces, SOCOM is seeking technology for cyberspace operations. It is looking information assurance throughout worldwide enterprise systems that also connect to joint, coalition, and partner networks. SOCOM is also interested in offensive and counter-threat capabilities, wanting to globally identify, attribute, geo-locate, monitor, interdict, and defend against threats while simultaneously being able to access, control, and disrupt enemy networks.
Intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance requirements also hinge on information technology, analytics, and Big Data. SOCOM seeks to identify and track targets using biometrics, unique mechanical defects, and augmentation of natural signatures. They want advanced processing techniques for the intelligence they gathered with secure data warehousing and data mining. Special Operations Command also seeks to improve communication and navigation technology on unmanned vehicles and data transmission on sensors.
[ by Charles Cameron — Dutch Islamophobia offers a terrible example of the sign turning into the signified ]
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Jan van Breughel, 2012? -- photo credit: Eric Brinkhorst, Algemeen Dagblad
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The quote that follows is offered without much comment, except to note that the formal correspondences between the two instances of “Henk and Ingrid” are as compelling as the two situations themselves.
As the Netherlands heads for a general election, barely a day passes without a mention of “Henk and Ingrid”, or Mr and Mrs Average, in a political debate that has revolved around the economy and the euro zone debt crisis.
The invention of populist politician Geert Wilders – who heads the anti-immigration, anti-euro Freedom Party – this mythical couple attracted a different kind of notoriety after a real Dutch Henk, with a wife called Ingrid, killed a Turkish immigrant, prompting commentators to warn that populism can backfire.
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Compare the strange story of the writing and real-life enactment by the avatar of Vishnu of Valmiki‘s Ramayana, which I alluded to in a comment on William Benzon’s blog:
I recall that when I was in India more than thirty years ago, I was told the Ramayana was written by Valmiki, first among poets — and it was only afterwards, and under the poem’s inspiration, that Vishnu did indeed take the form of Rama and come to earth to live out the story already depicted in Valmiki’s epic.
[ by Charles Cameron — different styles of online communication, main topic: Istanbul in three Islamic videos ]
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There’s passionate and visceral communication, and there’s communication that’s more scholarly, dispassionate and calm. Let’s begin and end with calm.
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Visceral communication is essential for getting people out of a theater on fire, but a 30% application of scholarly distance and calm may be prerequisite for avoiding panic — and scholarly communication may be important for conveying in detail the high-dimensionality of a complex topic, but a drop of visceral may ease the salient points into more general circulation.
In an earlier, text heavy post — Damascus, Dearborn, Rome, Vienna? — I belabored you with details as to just how much ambiguity and fog surrounds the use of place names in scriptural and prophetic contexts. Here I’d like to give you a visceral sense of what some prophetic voices are doing with those place names.
One of the easiest ways to move from scholarly to visceral is to switch from text quotation to video clip, so that’s what I’ll do here — but my first video clip will be relatively calm and scholarly as video clips go, the next one more visceral and exhortatory, while the third and final clip will use all the tricks of the feature movie trade to provide a Tolkien-heroic account of the Muslim siege and taking of then-Christian Constantinople in 1453.
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First, a very short clip from Adnan Oktar, aka Harun Yahya, widely known in the Islamic world for his lavishly illustrated books, CDs and DVDs presenting an Islamic version of creationism, the Mahdist end times — which he sees as entirely peaceable — and more besides.
In this clip, he’s talking about Istanbul, and he means that very city, even if it has sometimes been called Byzantium or Constantinople — or even on occasion, Rome.
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My second clip is far longer, and presents an interview with Sheikh Imran Nazar Hosein, Islamic scholar, sometime Trinidadian diplomat and sometimes fiery YouTube preacher, whom I have quoted previously in Al-Awlaki and the former and latter rains and elsewhere.
Hosein discusses the prophecies of the conquest of Constantinople by Muslim forces as part of the background for a grand sweep overview of what he terms the first and second Arab Springs — which he locates a century apart and views as both engineered by an Anglo-American alliance to advance a Zionist agenda — and contemporary events in Bahrain, Saudi, Syria, Iran, Israel, and Russia:
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It’s an hour-long interview, perhaps you didn’t watch the whole way through. Hosein concludes this interview, centered in Islamic prophecy about Constantinople, with a Saudi-American alliance facing off against an Iranian-Russian alliance in service to very long term Zionist interests, making the video a window not only on the Sheikh’s own worldview but also on how widely perceptions of the world situation can diverge:
I want the viewing audience to know that a situation is evolving in the world before our eyes, and we must understand it, that the two major powers in the world are now moving in a collision course, that collision course between these two major powers, the American-led alliance and the Russian-led alliance, is going to lead to nuclear warfare of such a magnitude that there is only one word that we can look for in the vocabulary to fit it, and that’s called Armageddon, that is, millions and millions and millions are going to die, most of them probably in North America and Europe, Europe of the East and Europe of the West — and what is left of the world after that, the Zionists hope that they can cope with it, and they can somehow survive and come out on top and Israel will rule the world, the rump that is left after the two giants engage in a war of mutual destruction, That is what we are facing now…
Is that what you thought scholarly Islamists were thinking? By what paths did a highly educated and world traveled man come to that conclusion?
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My third clip speaks for itself. It is a trailer for an upcoming motion picture about the siege of Constantinople, presented as heroic spectacle with improbable but striking feats of arms, beautiful but not excessively modestly dressed women, obligatory mass choruses of Allahu Akbar, and at least one reference to the Antichrist.
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I can’t wait to see it — but I expect to do so with mixed emotions. Perhaps they will stir up a decent blog post or two.
What emotions will they stir in those who identify with the heroic Mehmet II, and how much of an echo will those emotions find in the world around us? Long shot — any Turkey-NATO impact?
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To return to a calmer clime:
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Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul. I have prayed in the Sultan Ahmed — click image above to glimpse its beauty — I have relaxed deliciously at a nearby hammam.
The history of Istanbul could be the rich study of many lifetimes, its promise — for better or worse or a little of both — may have been variously prophesied or predicted, but remains to be seen.
Zenpundit is a blog dedicated to exploring the intersections of foreign policy, history, military theory, national security,strategic thinking, futurism, cognition and a number of other esoteric pursuits.
