More mystery jets. In the last couple of weeks there’s also been some progress on the 727 abandoned in North-Eastern Mali. For a start, it’s a 727, which is something. And, finally, there are pictures. The National of Abu Dhabi – a newspaper that is developing into a surprisingly useful source – has a good piece on the case and the growth of the Trans-Saharan drugs route more broadly.

Mr Lyman, a former US ambassador to both South Africa and Nigeria, warned that a heavy-handed approach by African officials would probably exacerbate the problem and threaten the desert region’s delicate security balance.

“Taking on the smuggling problem presents the danger of driving these tribal groups into the arms of AQIM because they resent a government presence that impinges on their smuggling activities, so it’s a delicate area how you increase in security” he said.

“You’ve got to build greater trust between Tuaregs and their home governments, and that requires more development and maybe even closing their eyes to some of the more benign smuggling activity that’s taking place. It’s not an easy task at all.”

Unsurprisingly, AFP wire service reporter Serge Daniel was the first journalist to get to the crash site, or more importantly, the first to file having done so. There are pictures of the wreck, which has been extensively scavenged for scrap metal; of course, the scrapmen will have helped to get rid of the evidence.

Hawa Semaga of Journal du Mali has an excellent piece which makes clear that the Guinea-Bissau authorities were looking for the plane at the time of its last flight, for a variety of reasons involving safety and registration violations. Further, it seems that the crew used false documents claiming that the aircraft was registered in Saudi Arabia. In yet another piece of useful information, the article confirms part of the route, and introduces the news that the plane passed through Cape Verde airspace on its way to the fateful airstrip, and then headed for Guinea-Bissau. They also suggest it stopped in Colombia as well as Venezuela.

My sources add that the current route was thought to be Dakar-Fortaleza-Panama-Maracaibo and then to the crash site, but there would have had to be intermediate stops between FOR and PTY and between MAR and Gao, as the sectors in question are 2,952 and 4,820 miles respectively. Replotting, with the new data:

(The map details are here.) That’s all possible, but the 727 would have needed a further South American stop between Fortaleza and Panama outward bound and between Maracaibo and Sal, Cape Verde inward bound – the simplest option would be to have gone via Maracaibo outward bound and via Fortaleza inward, which is marginal for the 727-200 (2,489 miles), but there might have been a fair wind that day.

Here’s their destination: N18.00031, W0.0031.

View Larger Map

Bugger all is an understatement. This Senegalese Web site has a gripping account of a visit to the crash site, starting off with a roast sheep party, hours of gruelling desert travel, fear of stumbling on another clandestine landing, and proceeding to a chat with security sources. Key facts appear to be that the landing zone was prepared on a dry lakebed, that the aircraft was taxied off the hard surface into the sand, and that some five vehicles with Niger registration plates met it, but that the Niger plates were faked in another neighbouring country. There’s also some detail on the scavenging of the aircraft:

Mais ce 10 décembre 2009, je constate que l’appareil a perdu beaucoup de poids. Je trouve sur place la réponse : je vois des traces de tadjila, nourriture prisée chez les touaregs. Alors que s’est-il passé ? Des dizaines, et des dizaines de personnes dont des touaregs viennent s’installer et couper l’épave, récupérer de l’aluminium, et aller le vendre aux forgerons. 1 500 FCFA le kilo d’aluminium. Triste fin pour l’épave. Triste fin pour l’avion.

Everyone is now working on the assumption that the aircraft was deliberately destroyed. It’s possible that the aircraft was driven into the sand in order to give the impression of a runway excursion accident. The author states that the aircraft’s registration is visible, and that it’s South American, but he or she doesn’t say what it was.

Boeing 727-230F number 21619, currently the top suspect, was placed in storage in Dakar by “Africa Aviation Assistance” in June, with a view to ferrying the aircraft to Rio in July. This company was shut down in July after it turned out that its AOC had never been issued. Around about the same time, another 727-200 freighter, number 22644, operating for DHL under the Saudi registration HZ-SNE, was destroyed in an accident in Lagos. And, after this crash, the first 727 was registered HZ-SNE for a while.

I therefore guess that the fake Saudi documents were used to pretend that the 727 that ended up in the desert was actually HZ-SNE/22644, respectably carrying general cargo for DHL. AAA planned to register it in the Guinea-Bissau (J5-) registry; apparently they involved Guinea in some way, as the Guinea authorities were looking for the plane. But we know that if it used the registration J5-GGU at all, as previously thought, it was yet another fake.

It doesn’t seem obvious, though, that anyone would casually torch an aircraft that had the special feature of having a twin identity.

A snowy, white day here in New England. Finally some real weather, the kind that makes you feel alive.

- Hugo Chavez’s bellicosity may finally come to a head, the BBC reports. Apparently it’s not just an anti-Bush thing with him; he’s accused Columbia and the United States of preparing to invade. The Venezuelan Army is already blowing up bridges, in all senses of the phrase.

- Everybody still hates everybody else in Iraq. They’re just not killing each other anymore, but turning to politics instead. Kurds will no longer accept “second-citizen status.”

More after the jump…

- Newsweek has a series of articles on the counterfactual Gore presidency. David Rakoff has a little summary of the theoretical last decade, Michael Isikoff writes about Gore’s impeachment, and Christopher Hitchens argues that the ‘aughts would not have been so different with Gore as president instead of Bush. Rakoff ignores a few constitutional realities (such as the 22nd Amendment conflicting with Bill Clinton’s running for Vice President), but they’re all worth considering. Joe Lieberman hilarity absolutely ensues in most of the pieces. And Hitchens is dead-on, as usual.

- Via Security Crank: the insurgent ‘hacking’ of Predator drone feeds was not some “stupendous feat of black hattery.” The unencrypted feeds have been known to the Pentagon since 2000, and they’re not in real-time. Gives them an idea of how good the zoom lenses are, though.

- The IEEE, of all organizations, has gotten into this whole open-source warfare thing.

- It’s Ottomania! More Turkish imperial nostalgia. Either this works well for the sake of national coherence, or it deepens the secular/not divide. Jury’s still out on…Turkey.

- 8 hilarious secessionist movements. It may seem like a remote possibility now, but give it time. Presumably when the end comes, it will be an amicable breakup and not a bloody rebellion, but that’s of course entirely in the realm of speculation. And hopefully doesn’t come to pass in my lifetime.

- The beginning of Niall Ferguson’s The War of the World is titled “9/11/01.” The world, of course, is at the peak of globalization. Things are more interconnected than ever before; an Englishman’s breakfast originates in 12 different countries. As we soon discover, he is in fact referring to the year 1901. That prosperity and interdependence was soon shattered by the Great War, and did not recover fully until 100 years later. Now, says Daniel Gross, we’re facing a similar decline. Globalization becomes localization and decentralization; the center cannot hold.

For all the debate surrounding the applicability of Sun Tzu and Clausewitz to modern war, it’s fairly well-established that much of Clausewitz’s On War is the product of his age. Sun Tzu is perhaps better read, even by Western armies, if not for the sole purpose that it often serves as the guide for their enemies (not to oversimplify or state a categorical, but this is at least the assumption). At a strategic level, there is certainly some utility to be found, but the image one gets of Clausewitz’s writing is that of a relentless forward-only-advancing army, with no guile or subtlety to deploy.

It was for all these reasons that I was dismayed to hear Brigadier General Larry Nicholson of the 2nd MEB refer to Marja, Afghanistan as the “enemy center of gravity” (about 1:20 in the clip). Marja is a “stronghold” of sorts, where insurgents stockpile weapons and have built defenses. Granted, General Nicholson was paraphrasing Afghans (whose most frequent asked question is, “when are the Marines leaving?”), but the fact remains that he’s employing Clausewitzian terminology to describe a decidedly un-Clausewitzian conflict.

You don’t hit the enemy where’s he strongest; nor do you hit him where he’s weakest. You attack where the enemy does not defend; you defend where the enemy does not attack. You avoid cities at all cost (this is not entirely applicable to Afghanistan, but it’s a strong general principle). If the Imperial German Army was wise enough to bypass Liège and Namur, you’d think the 2nd MEB could do the same. Obviously the parallels aren’t exact, but they’re there. If Marja is what they’re defending, Marja is what we don’t attack.

So this will be a little longer than usual. It’s adapted from a paper I was writing last week, but fits in very well with everything I’ve been examining on this site. With that said…

“They hate us because we don’t know why they hate us.” The perceived ignorance of Americans as to the wider world around them was often cited as a compelling reason for the mass murder of several thousand citizens on September 11, 2001. Low scores on math and science, and the inability of two-thirds of Americans between eighteen and twenty-four years old to locate Iraq on a map in 2006 merely perpetuated this claim; that somehow American geographical ignorance is responsible for jihadists and regional strife around the world.

This is of course not the only suggested explanation for conflict in the developing world. Essentially, all the arguments put forth can be summarized as pertaining to ‘greed’, or monetary and personal gain, and ‘grievance’, i.e., ideological and cultural clashes. Abridging the vast array of motives to these two is oversimplifying the matter to begin with; further choosing one of the two as the sole factor would be downright spurious. Complicating matters is the tendency to use the ‘pre-modern’ character of third world conflicts to build an intellectual bridge back to the very beginning of history.

Several cross-cultural studies have shown that predominantly, revenge for homicide and economic concerns were the overriding causes of pre-state warfare. Lawrence Keeley cites the cases of pig theft in New Guinea, where pig-rearing was a crucial activity, and Plains Indian conflicts over wild horses (an important resource for transportation and hunting purposes) as typical economically-driven wars. Malthusian growth models have also been highlighted as a cause, with expanding populations driven to war by a lack of land.[1] Attempts to attribute these wars to the lack of a modern ethical code are meaningless at a time when fear and hunger were inevitable and absolute. As societies approached the dawn of civilization, these seemingly clear-cut explanations would be supplanted by less tangible honor killings.

Even accounting for change over many generations, much of the developed world’s thinking on third world conflicts inevitably resorts to these primitive descriptions. At first glance, attempting to comprehend the myriad reasons for soldiering recalls P.J. O’Rourke’s “three great rules of the social sciences: Folks do lots of things. We don’t know why. Test on Friday.”[2] But while conflict motive cannot be boiled down to a binary, there are several patterns that can be discerned. These are belief, boredom, and bread (or more directly, fear, habit, and want).

The most commonly cited motivation for conflicts in the developing world is belief. This can be further broken down into religion and culture. Aside from the (seemingly) obvious insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, the religious half of belief would also seem to explain the standoff between Israel and the Arab world, the constant tension between Pakistan and India, and the Sa’dah insurgency in Yemen. But to call all of these religious in character would be missing a large part of the picture. India and Pakistan, once united under the British Raj, separated in a bloody, messy, partition that quickly deteriorated into all-out war. The two nations have a history of violence, and while the specific contest between India and Pakistan as nation-states is by definition confined to the decades since 1947, the ‘cultural’ conflict has been present for much longer than that.

Culture can also reflect the ascendency of nationalism as a definition of one’s allegiance, which then leads to the routine “boredom” of developing world conflicts. Whatever the roots of the Indo-Pakistani struggles, it has reached a point where it simply ‘is what it is.’ Hence the absurd spectacle of fighting over “a glacier so remote that it can hardly even be located on a map.”[3] On a sub-national level, the same feelings of the inevitability of identity can also manifest themselves. David Ronfeldt asserts that “some so-called failed states are really failed tribes.” Thus, we can see a sort of self-similar scale invariance at every level of society. Personal reasons become group reasons become raison d’état. The problem with this view, at least for the West, is when it because a reflexive assumption. ‘Underlying conditions’ is a useful phrase, but can be easily misunderstood. Worse yet would be to declare the problem solved after identifying a single contributing factor.

Conflict can easily be ascribed to cultural differences and even expected behavior patterns, but these perhaps serve more as legitimizers, rather than actual catalysts. This begins to fall into the “bread” category on the side of want. Naturally, expulsion of ‘undesirable minorities’ and ethnic cleansing are seen by the West as “pure, ‘ethnic’ struggles, inevitable corruptions of ‘ancient hatreds’.”[4] The increasingly globalized and modernizing world means that the ‘impenetrable’ world that we attempt to see through the lens of culture is well aware of our observation, and can use the expected emphasis on cultures to explain away their actions after the fact. When characterization becomes universal, it becomes impossible to attempt anything other than grandiose reform, regime change, or all out war. Consider Fareed Zakaria attempting to answer the question, ‘why do they hate us?’:

Bin Laden and his followers are not an isolated cult like Aum Shinrikyo or the Branch Davidians or demented loners like Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber. They come out of a culture that reinforces their hostility, distrust and hatred of the West – and of America in particular. This culture does not condone terrorism but fuels the fanaticism that is at its heart.

It is tempting to read too much into cultural differences in the developing world as catalysts for conflict. At the risk of excessive postmodernism, identity is largely a recent construct. To wit: created and exploited by colonial powers as a tool of imperial rule, ethnicity has really only achieved any hold when coupled with nationalistic programs. John Bowen warns that the three big assumptions – “that ethnic identities are ancient and unchanging…that these identities motivate people to persecute and kill… [and] that ethnic diversity itself inevitably leads to violence,”– are completely mistaken. Beyond the simple fact that it ignores other crucial factors, often warring parties seeking to obfuscate their true intentions exaggerate their differences. In Military Orientalism, Patrick Porter describes the common American belief in Afghanistan that “it is culture above all that makes the Afghans tick.” But as he goes on to describe, this is not at all the case:

The wartime behaviour of Afghans suggests that their culturally-rooted beliefs and taboos are not decisively important. First, the Taliban did not come out and fight. In a tactical moment, self-preservation trumped religious sensitivity. More deeply, the idea that…ritual honour is the Afghans’ political centre of gravity, contradicts other patterns of behaviour.[5]

Defying expectations – the “element of surprise” – is a principle tenet of warfare in both East and West; in developing countries and in the first world; according to both Sun Tzu and to Clausewitz. Encouraging the attribution of particular explanations to their own behavior and then defying those expectations is a logical wartime tactic. It might seem then that it is self-preservation, or rather, existence above all that drives people to (and from) conflict. But is it out need, or just out of plain want that conflicts occur?

The case of piracy in Somalia is a particularly fascinating one. The traditional assumption is that the complete absence of any central authority in Mogadishu leads to piracy as a means of acting-out, and the only source of income available. While not entirely incorrect, the “desperation” and last-resort nature of piracy is not how the pirates in the Horn of Africa have sustained themselves. Instead, the entire operation has become a community effort, a ‘pirate stock exchange’. Ransom money funds the infrastructure – the roads, the schools, and the hospitals – in Haradheere, 250 miles north of Mogadishu. The community invests in piracy; a 22 year-old divorcee contributed a portion of her alimony towards a single rocket-propelled grenade for a raid on a Spanish fishing ship. She made $75,000 in thirty-eight days.

The sua sponte approach to local governance is not confined to the anarchic regions of Africa. In the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, drug cartels have control over much of the territory; even the well-armed, paramilitary Brazilian police are afraid to enter their sectors. In response, private vigilante civilian militias formed, and went from controlling 10% of the most violent areas in 2005 to 36% in 2008. At this point, the warfare itself is out of the hands of the central government. Like the slums of Bombay or the former District Six ghetto of Cape Town, the Rio favelas are an example of ‘government-free’ zones left to local control. In these cases, the fighting is at an existential level, or at least at a level of acceptable existence.

This, then, is the future of conflict: decentralized, devoid of ideology, and community-based. The Balkanizing of the world that began with decolonization and accelerated after the collapse of the Soviet Union is not a temporary phenomenon. The Western Sahara region of Morocco, the fracturing of Somalia, Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan, Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, the Tamils of Sri Lanka, Chechnya, Dagestan, and Ingushetia in Russia – the list of succession and liberation movements in the 21st century is unending. Of course, some of these (see the Vermont Republic) are little more than dreams and idle talk, but as the August War in Ossetia and the ongoing Sunni-Kurd conflict in northern Iraq have shown, their supporters are deadly serious.

The devolution of identity and power back to more localized regions is a phenomenon even in the developed world. The United States is divided between ‘red states’ and ‘blue states’, with their inhabitants often proud to proclaim political allegiance to one party or another. The European Free Alliance groups together the Bavaria Party in Germany, advocates for a separate Flanders and Walloon in Belgium, an independent Alsace-Lorraine, and other regional identity groups from across the European Union. In the case of Alsace, after being exchanged between Germany and France so many times, and seeing so much of the twentieth century’s bloodshed on its soil, is it any wonder?

Complicating the global identity crisis is what John Robb calls the obsolescence of state dominance. “The wars states, at least Western ones, can wage today are tightly constrained affairs … High-risk wars with other states are extremely rare because of the potential for nuclear holocaust, and as such are fast becoming extinct. Today,” he writes, “wars are wars of choice.”[6] They are a luxury of the developed world, and a part of life for the developing and emerging ones. In their case, “greed versus grievance” is clearly a false binary. Identity may not be inevitable, but for the foreseeable future, conflict will be. The real question should be: how do we stop it?

[2] P.J. O’Rourke, Age and Guile: Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995), 207.

[3] Martin van Creveld, The Transformation of War: The Most Radical Reinterpretation of Armed Conflict since Clausewitz (New York: the Free Press, 1991), 215.

[4] Patrick Porter, Military Orientalism: Eastern War through Western Eyes (London: Hurst, 2009), 53.

[5] Porter, Military Orientalism, 143-44.

[6] John Robb, Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2007), 69.

We had a post about the MQM in Karachi and the Taliban. Strangely enough, Reuters got a fascinating interview with the MQM mayor of Karachi a couple of days later. It’s a must-read – one of the main points that comes through is the way in which the struggle up on the frontier and in Afghanistan is indivisible from the trading world of the Gulf and the Arabian Sea.

The city of 18 million people generates 68 percent of the government revenue and 25 percent of Pakistan’s gross domestic product but it is vulnerable to both militant attacks and political violence, said mayor Syed Mustafa Kamal.

“As Karachi is the revenue engine for Pakistan, it’s the same revenue engine for the Taliban,” Kamal told Reuters in an interview in his office….”People are being kidnapped here in Karachi and the ransom is taken in Waziristan,” he said, referring to a northwestern ethnic Pashtun region where the army has been battling militants since October.

Four hundred million rupees ($4.8 million) had recently been sent from one Karachi bank branch to various parts of the northwest in one month, he said. “That’s abnormal,” he said. “For sure, the biggest chunk of Taliban war … resources are going from Karachi.”

He also has some interesting things to say about NATO logistics in Afghanistan:

Kamal said a large proportion of supplies bound for U.S.-led forces in landlocked Afghanistan arrive at Karachi’s port, which he said was still vulnerable to an attack that could cripple the U.S. war effort.

“If they don’t get their water supply through this route the next day they’ll be drinking Afghan water and the next day half the army will have stomach problems,” he said.

I don’t know if we really are shipping water in through Karachi, but it’s certainly an answer to the trick question about the MQM’s current tactical alignment. I’m not sure what to make of Jeremy Scahill’s piece on ex-Blackwater (a “media scouring” outpost in Karachi that’s also a “lilypad to jump off to Uzbekistan” – jumping past other major US bases like Bagram and Kandahar, presumably?), but it’s worth noting that, for what it’s worth, Kestral Trading, the local firm that actually seems to handle the cargo and guard the convoys is usually accused of being part of the Musharraf family (low-grade sources, but then….)

I’ve been reading John Robb’s Global Guerrillas for a while. Robb is obviously a smart guy, and I think he is occasionally Winner of teh Internetz. One of the things that interests me about Robb is his apparent lack of a political agenda. This allows him to praise authors such as Cory Doctorow, and Bruce Sterling… and post columns by Walter S. Lind.

Lind is one of the guys behind the concept of Fourth Generation War, an idea which, though it has its critics, seems nowadays to be especially prescient. He’s also associated with The Free Congress Foundation, a cultural conservative think tank, founded (in part) by Joseph Coors, when The Heritage Foundation became too centrist. The Southern Poverty Law Center has an interesting report on them here (scroll down almost halfway). Among the… interesting… things Mr. Lind has to say are such gems as this:

“The real damage to race relations in the South came not from slavery, but from Reconstruction, which would not have occurred if the South had won.” Had that happened, Lind added, “at least part of North America would still stand for Western culture, Christianity and an appreciation of the differences between ladies and gentlemen.” (From the SPLC article)

The Foundation has also been responsible for such gripping tomes as The Homosexual Agenda and Gays, AIDS and You.

So, here’s the question I’m wrestling with, at the moment: Can someone so clearly wrong and out of touch on cultural and social issues be worth listening to on any other matter? Or, perhaps more to the point, can I look past “social conservatism” or “cultural conservatism” to get to what Robb- a guy I respect- sees as valuable information?

At what point does someone become so much of an asshole that everything s/he says is suspect?

Historically, this has been a problem with people such as Thomas Jefferson- an intellectual, a rationalist, a brilliant writer, an owner of human beings, some of whom were coerced into sex. On the one hand, this was over two centuries ago. On the other, to be blunt, motherfucker owned slaves.

We can, and I often do, rely on the “man of his times” defense. This is harder with someone like Lind, at least for me. See, homophobia (a useless word, really; makes it sound like a silly little thing, like being freaked out by spiders) is not a political ideology. At least, I don’t see it that way. It’s bigotry. That’s it. It’s not anymore a valid viewpoint than believing that people of Mexican descent are greasy and lazy. It’s wrong. It’s not “political correctness” or “cultural marxism”. It’s not being a dick.

So, then: how much do someone’s views on Topic A keep you from listening to the same person regarding Topic B?

An inverse example is Christopher Hitchens. I disagree with damn near everything the man has ever said regarding the Iraq War and about a dozen other topics. But I could listen to him talk all day.

I dunno. Maybe, when someone looks you in the eye and insists the Earth is flat as a pancake, it’s hard to trust them on anything else.

Anyone at all interested in future warfare, insurgency, politics, or  just generally the future of our (or any) country, you’ve got to read this article by Bill Lind.

The Mighty Curtis Gale Weeks, He Who Has Tasted Internet Death and Laughed, comments:

You and Peter and David appear to be merely reinventing the wheel.

For instance, in 2007, I had already written about the kinds of problems both you and Peter have been discussing, in “X vs X:Boom and the Generations in Conflict“, specifically the question of linear progressions pigeon-holed to specific epics. Although there I also, like later contra-Arherring and some others, proposed, and still maintain, the worth in seeing these generations/grades/whathaveyou in relationship to each other:

“Viewing the generations in a linear representation, in relationship to the Boom as Arherring has done, may offer insights to different styles of fighting which need not emerge solely as a uni-directional development of warfare. We might in fact contemplate particular strategies which have been employed throughout the history of humanity (which generally runs along with the history of warfare) and place these strategies either to the left of the Boom or to the right; are they, then, also “generations” of warfare? The question may be moot, if we are only to consider strategic dynamics as they relate to the Boom, or to kinetics, in the way Arherring has done. However, to postulate a generational model is to suggest a general uni-directional development through which different strategies emerge as a consequence of previous strategies which have been employed. A singular generational model need not be applied to the entire history of warfare in order to box certain styles of fighting into specific epochs, and only those epochs, within the history of humanity; rather, a generational model only need show that a given style of fighting has resulted as a consequence of another — and this will usually occur within a specific epoch, or a small time frame, simply because some overlap of generations, or competitive conflict, must occur in order for one style to develop as a consequence of another.”

In the later post, I made an argument against the sort of thing Peter has done with his “new framework” approach; such approaches, similar to Lind’s — and after all that seems to be his only model, ever — are mere descriptive. This reduces such frameworks to near uselessness. To reduce his offering to absurdity, suppose I could do similarly by delineating the style of dress, uniform, or combat gear broken out for distinct periods of time. This could be done. It might actually describe epochs, at least vis-a-vis the apparel; or, it might actually describe certain niches or styles which have reappeared throughout history. But it’s merely descriptive:

“In point of fact, Lind’s model has often caused dispute, particularly on the fourth tier, that is with regard to the prognostication of 4GW. Useful or not, the first three generations are descriptive of what has already occurred in our modern era and so are “pre-verified”. The fourth generation is a guess of what is to come, which has been partly verified by current conflicts but was left open enough to suggest all future conflicts.

The fact that Lind’s GMW leaves “fourth generation warfare” open to becoming whatever happens in the future — the definition is vague and fluid enough — severely limits the usefulness of GMW. What are we to learn from GMW that will benefit us, whether as a state or as individuals engaged in conflict? By leaving no room for the development of a “fifth generation of warfare” that could defeat a “fourth generation warfare”, we are left no recourse in GMW except the ability to describe: Having described 1GW through 3GW, we come to “4GW” which we can use to tag all future events. What we are to do about those events doesn’t matter and is conspicuously absent from the GMW model.

xGW, on the other hand, would seek to suggest a framework which would allow problem-solving. If we eject the word “generation” from the model and instead use something else, such as “grade” [2], and by so doing eject the most common connotations of “generation”, we can perhaps begin to postulate not merely the styles of conflict as they emerge exterior to us, one after another, but also the relationship of these styles to one another in a useful manner: i.e., we may postulate an interior activity, or a reflective and prospective activity which becomes problem-solving. One force sees its opponent’s activity, assesses itself, and seeks to develop a better method of fighting. For me, this is at heart the greatest strength of xGW.”

And if I may backtrack (which these recent postulations, here and there, seem to be), I would reintroduce from that first link the very same idea, or nearly the same, given by a commenter at one of Peter’s threads: that we may view these G’s as they appear within a specific culture, area, etc., without trying to lump all of human history, the world over, into a singular unidirectional progression:

“For our xGW, we only need to understand the possessive pronoun. Criticisms of the xGW theory that is currently propounded usually take the extreme position of pointing out that Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar or some other historical figure or group also fought in an xGW manner or an x+1GW manner; and since the proponents of current xGW theory are assumed to be referring to the entire history of war when they discuss xGW, a theory which one assumes must fit a single uni-directional evolution of warfare spanning the entire history of humanity, those proponents are speaking gibberish. Well, some are; others concern themselves only with our xGW, limiting the theory to the period since the Peace of Westphalia or in some other way.”

I.e., this effort to create a Descriptive Model ™ that must be able to describe all that has happened in the history of warfare, the world over, may be moot or distracting. What we have to do now is understand our own time (which extends backward somewhat, even to before our particular births, but not back to the dawn of humanity) and try to come to some valuable understanding of our time which we might apply to current needs. If we do see a useful somewhat-generational — taking several meanings of that word – development in our time, using what we see does not require that we also find a way to lump other efforts, from thousands of years ago or from vanished societies, into our vision of our own time.

Also, a final note: this hang-up on terminology seems to me to be pretty silly, even juvenile, and generally self-serving. Peter can only see so far into the definition of “generation” and so he had an apoplexy, like many others accustomed to stopping at “1.” in the dictionary. “Grade” and “gradient” may serve to trip up others, for similar reasons. It is too bad, but suggesting a whole theory is trash merely because a word brings up one particular connotation for one particular person, or several persons, is useless.

To which I attempted to reply over at CGW’s but his CAPTCHA was fighting a never-ending war of attrition with my browser. So I will post my reply here:

@CGW

(BTW, Akisment thought your comment was spam but it has been rescued.)

The problem with xGW is that it has outgrown its current taxonomy. 4GW made sense in its original context because Lind was talking about four generations of war. Hence calling it 4GW makes sense. Though I don’t find 4GW very interesting as a framework, within its original context its chosen taxonomy makes sense.

xGW emerged as an expansion of the original 4GW framework but it has acquired more relevance and, in many ways, transcends the original framework. The tight terminological coupling between xGW and legacy 4GW, however, does xGW a disservice. It merely confuses transient passers-by like Haq, draws the derision of legacy 4GWers, and completely confuses n00bs. It deserves to be freed from 4GW and its trappings.

Peter’s proposed taxonomy is not a significant improvement as it seems too influenced by a temporary 4GW overdose. John Keegan had a taxonomy similar to Peter’s in his deeply flawed A History of Warfare twenty years ago: warrior, mercenary, slave, regular, conscript, and militia. To quote Keegan:

The warrior category is self-explanatory, but I use it to include such groups as the samurai of Japan and the Western knightly class, the nucleus of which may almost always be identified as the remnant of a warrior tribe, alien or native; warrior cults, like the original Muslims and the Sikhs, and self-made warrior polities, like the Zulu or Ashanti, include themselves. Mercenaries are those that sell military service for money—though also for such inducements as grants of land, admission to citizenship (offered by the Roman army and the French Foreign Legion) or preferential treatment. Regulars are mercenaries who already enjoy citizenship or its equivalent but choose military service as a means of subsistence; in affluent states regular service may take on some of the attributes of a profession…[An example of the slave system is the Mamelukes, which Keegan discussed earlier in the book]…The militia principle lays the duty of performing military service upon all fit male citizens; failure or refusal to do duty usually entails loss of citizenship. Conscription is a tax levied upon a male resident’s time at a certain age of life, though to citizens payment of such a tax usually represented as a civic duty; selective conscription, especially if for long periods of service to an unrepresentative government — twenty years was the term in Russia before the emancipation of the serfs — is difficult to differentiate from the slave system.

Not satisfied with that, Keegan organizes his chapters by a chronology based on succeeding technologies of war: stone, flesh (mainly horseflesh), iron, and fire.

Dave Ronfeldt’s TIMN predates anything that’s happened in this circle of the woods with either xGW or 4GW so labeling it a “reinvention” of 4GW or xGW is inaccurate. If you go to the RAND website you can download his original TIMN paper (from 1996). The paper on “melee, massing, maneuver, and swarming” (MMMS) dates from 2000: He couldn’t be “reinventing” anything unless he took copious notes on D5GW, went back in time, and posted his RAND studies as “original” papers. Mr. Rondfeldt is a talented man but he’s not that talented.

I can see your point that using 0…5 can serve as an incentive to pulling yourself up to the next GW in order to improve your GW but I think it’s still too linear. War follows parallel paths; suggesting that the path of adaption follows a model of “Bob is waging 3GW ergo I must wage 4GW to beat his 3GW mojo” does not handle the case of “Bob is waging 0GW, 1GW, and 5GW at the same time, ergo I must use 6GW mixed with 97GW to beat his 0/1/5GW”. Classifying warfare by jumping back and forth along a number line is more a exercise from second grade math than a useful analytic framework. Yes, analysis must act by breaking down a complex spectrum of conflict into discernible wavelengths but saying that “this gradient of war is brought to you by the letters G and W and the number 5″ is not sufficiently clear. Categorizing war by the composition of the belly button lint caused by the presence or absence of a particular style of uniform may actually be more precise than de-generationalized xGW. War operates among parallel paths of belly button lint not linear belly button lint. It transcends the imprint of “innie” and “outie”.

Terminological exactitude is necessary not only for war nerds like us but for the great unwashed. They need a better framework of war that is sufficiently clear enough that they can understand the great matters of war and peace. Moving the American public past “no one wins in war”, “all war is bad except when waged against Nazis”, “no more Vietnams”, “the Good War”, “there is no military solution, only a political solution”, and other such claptrap is not helped by obscurely numbered gradients. I could explain 4GW to grandma but I’d have a hard time explaining xGW.

I aspire to a universal and accessible theory of war. As a military history buff, I see commonalities from Sun-tzu and Thucydides down to Kilcullen, commonalities that can be arranged in a universal framework, commonalities that xGW can throw light on outside of its current Lindish straight jacket, and commonalities that elude the military naifs that populate Washington right now. These commonalities can not only provide explanations relevant to the military historian but relevant to the problems of the current strategic practitioner. If a theory does not provide a (yes) descriptive framework for general understanding a phenomenon, especially when it’s a phenomenon as broadly consequential as war, then it has no practical usefulness except as entertainment for those who find debating the number of angels who can dance on the head of a pin amusing (3/4 of the male Internet population but still…).

xGW could have more usefulness but not as currently constituted.

I’ve been following Kotare’s examination of the Generations of War (4GW) framework over at The Strategist:

1. On the bullshit of “generations of war”
2. Roots – the origin of “generations of war”
3. “We few, we happy few, we band of [1GW] brothers”
4. “Cohorts of War” – a general framework

Kotare has gone from a straight up attack on 4GW to a somewhat tentative embrace, even developing his own “cohorts of war” pantomime of 4GW. David Rondfeldt made this comment:

From a different angle, always open for discussion and refinement, here’s an alternative, four-fold view, focused on organization and doctrine, that John Arquilla and I have elaborated before, including before I knew about 4GW:

“Accordingly, the history of warfare is a history of the progressive development of four fundamental forms of engagement: the melee, massing, maneuver, and swarming. Briefly, warfare has evolved from chaotic melees in which every man fought on his own, to the design of massed but often rigidly shaped formations, and then to the adoption of maneuver. Swarming appears at times in this lengthy history, but its major advances as a doctrine will occur in the coming years. Some are now underway.”

If this formulation ever looks interesting, go here to download our old Rand study on “Swarming and the Future of Conflict”:

http://www.rand.org/pubs/documented_briefings/DB311/

Chapter Two (pp. 7-23) is about the evolution of military organization and doctrine: melee, massing, maneuver, and swarming, with reference to the roles of information and information technology in the evolution of these four forms.

What that write-up does not show, except in a passing footnote, is that this formulation derives from a view of social evolution — my pet theory about TIMN — which holds that, across the ages, societies have come up with only four major forms of organization: tribes, hierarchical institutions (as in states and their militaries), markets, and networks. Thus, early tribes are associated with melees, hierarchical institutions with the devekopment of massed formations, the rise of market-oriented societies with the turn to maneuver doctrines, and now the information age with networked swarming.

4GW overlaps with networked swarming.

My comment was  growing a bit lengthy so it’s been upgraded to a post:

David Ronfeldt’s TIMN is a much better general framework than the Generations of War framework. Every iteration of the Generation of War framework eventually runs into the problem that the phenomena it describes (line and column, maneuver, etc.) do not manifest themselves linearly throughout history. Someone who wishes to keep using the Generations of War for substantive analysis must then replace their generations with some other categorization that allows each “generation” to appear in parallel with other “generations” or appear before a “generation”, disappear, and then reappear again. Always in motion these generations are. Inevitably, the temptation arises to substitute “gradient”, “gradation”, (my apologies Peter) “cohort”, or some other numerically denominated category for the original “generation”. TIMN, on the other hand, unfolds chronologically from tribe to institution to market to network but all elements of TIMN have manifested themselves in varying degrees since the beginning of human history and they are all manifesting themselves now to varying degrees. F.A. Hayek’s one insightful comment fits in with TIMN:

If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed, rules of the micro-cosmos (i.e., of the small band or troop, or of say, our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilization), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often makes us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet if we were always to apply the rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them. So we must learn to live in two sorts of a world at once.

Much of the interesting implications of TIMN comes from the lag between the mental universe our mind inhabits (that of the tribe) and the complex world we inhabit (in order from least to most confusing, institution, market, network). The much smaller lag between Lind’s original four generations is less threatening because it has yet to cause the mental contortions of the lag between tribe, institution, market, and network.

TIMN also intersects with the Adaptive Market Hypothesis:

The primary components of the AMH consist of the following ideas:

• (A1) Individuals act in their own self-interest.
• (A2) Individuals make mistakes.
• (A3) Individuals learn and adapt.
• (A4) Competition drives adaptation and innovation.
• (A5) Natural selection shapes market ecology.
• (A6) Evolution determines market dynamics.

EMH and AMH have a common starting point in A1, but the two paradigms part company in A2 and A3. In efficient markets, investors do not make mistakes, nor is there any learning and adaptation because the market environment is stationary and always in equilibrium. In the AMH framework, mistakes occur frequently, but individuals are capable of learning from mistakes and adapting their behavior accordingly. However, A4 states that adaptation does not occur independently of market forces but is driven by competition, that is, the push for survival. The interactions among various market participants are governed by natural selection—the survival of the richest, in our context—and A5 implies that the current market environment is a product of this selection process. A6 states that the sum total of these components—selfish individuals, competition, adaptation, natural selection, and environmental conditions— is what we observe as market dynamics.

The key insight of AMH is the lag between the speed of biological evolution and the speed of cultural evolution:

The proper response to the question of how individuals determine the point at which their optimizing behavior is satisfactory is this: Such points are determined not analytically, but through trial and error and, of course, natural selection. Individuals make choices based on experience and their best guesses as to what might be optimal, and they learn by receiving positive or negative reinforcement from the outcomes. If they receive no such reinforcement, they do not learn. In this fashion, individuals develop heuristics to solve various economic challenges, and as long as those challenges remain stable, the heuristics eventually will adapt to yield approximately optimal solutions.

If, on the other hand, the environment changes, then it should come as no surprise that the heuristics of the old environment are not necessarily suited to the new. In such cases, we observe behavioral biases—actions that are apparently ill advised in the context in which we observe them. But rather than labeling such behavior irrational, we should recognize that suboptimal behavior is likely when we take heuristics out of their evolutionary context. A more accurate term for such behavior might be “maladaptive.” The flopping of a fish on dry land may seem strange and unproductive, but under water, the same motions propel the fish away from its predators. And the antagonistic effect of human emotional reactions on logical reasoning described earlier is maladaptive for many financial contexts.

A specific example of lag that the AMH paper discusses is the structure of the triune brain:

The starting point is a basic fact about the brain: it is not a homogeneous mass of nerve cells but a collection of specialized components, many of which have been identified with particular functions and types of behavior. For example, the brainstem, which is located at the base of the brain and sits on top of the spinal cord, controls the most basic bodily functions such as breathing and heartbeat and is active even during deep sleep. The limbic system, which comprises several regions in the middle of the brain, is responsible for emotions, instincts, and social behavior such as feeding, fight-or-flight responses, and sexuality. And the cerebral cortex, which is the tangled maze of gray matter that forms the outer layer of the brain, is what allows us to think complex and abstract thoughts and where language and musical abilities, logical reasoning, learning, long-term planning, and sentience reside. These three areas form the triune brain model, proposed by MacLean; he refers to them as the reptilian, mammalian, and hominid brains, respectively. This terminology underscores his hypothesis that the human brain is the outcome of an evolutionary process in which basic survival functions appeared first, more advanced social behavior came second, and uniquely human cognitive abilities emerged most recently (that is, within the past 100,000 years).

My previous post commented:

From this we can postulate three biological OODA loops within the human brain, each one with ever shorter lags in adaptation:

1. The reptilian loop
2. The mammalian loop
3. The hominid loop

If we follow the momentum of AMH and take the logic of evolution into less biologically hardwired human “software”, we can see five OODA loops and the steadily decreasing lag between each:

1. The cultural loop
2. The political loop
3. The strategic loop
4. The operational loop
5. The tactical loop

Much of the adaptation mismatches that occur in human political communities and individuals can be traced to adaptive lag. A particular loop is optimized for a specific environment and acquires optimizations peculiar to that environment. However, the environment changes and loops with slower lag times adapt at a sometimes glacial pace. Within the “software” portion of the human brain, culture is the slowest to adapt, followed by politics, and strategy. This is not to say rapid adaption in software can’t happen at these higher levels like culture, only that, on average, adaption will be slower than the lowest levels.As the AMH argues, systemic human irrationality is not necessarily globally irrational as it is locally irrational. Many adaptations such as heuristics and cognitive biases make sense in a legacy adaption context but make less sense in a contemporary adaption context. They are rational under the right circumstances but irrational under other circumstances. Similarly, the software stack of adaptation contains rationalities under some contexts but irrationalities under other contexts. The true measure of adaptive capacities is how rapidly irrationalities can be replaced with rationalities. Since some irrationalities are bound up in emotion and power distributions, this isn’t always easy. On the other hand, some adaptions which seem irrational to a “rational” observer and that are done away with turn out to have been rational after all. The end result is a stack of OODA loops that contain a mix of rationality and irrationality and lag behind the adaption curve on average.

TIMN fits this logic very well. The human brain is very optimized for the tribe, the dominant form of human organization for 99.999999% of our shared history. When dealing with inter-familial or inter-personal relations, our brains function reasonably well. When, as Hayek expounded, we take that same tribal mindset and apply it to the more complex “macro-cosmos” of the institution, market, or network, our touch is less sure and our errors are larger. This increasingly veers into Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “fourth quadrant” where the optimized structures of our brain run into phenomena their less and less able to accurately process. From this quadrant emerges the “black swans” that Nassim Nicholas Taleb has loosed upon the world. You need more than four generations to digest them.

We hear about them all the time when reading an AP report on whatever war they happen to be reporting on. International Laws of War. These laws are well intentioned, and designed to prevent civilian casualties. As a result of these laws and global economic integration, conflicts between nation-states are becoming almost non-existent. One would argue that this is good, maybe it is, but it has a severe side effect.

People still hate each other, people are still greedy, people still (and always will) have a desire to kill their fellow man. These people have been deprived of “legal” means to do so, or rather, they have been deprived of using the nation-state to wage war, therefore we have tribes, criminal organizations, terrorist groups, militias and other such groups fighting to achieve their goals. These people don’t care about borders, and are playing a huge part in the downfall of the nation-state as we know it. Meanwhile, the nation-states are pushing to become more and more integrated with each other, economically, socially, politically and about any other way you can imagine. So in other words, they’re erasing their own borders, and handing over more and more control to the UN and the general global community.

As a result of both of these things, the nation-state is falling apart. People’s loyalties are no longer to their government, but rather to what have been called “primary loyalties”. These are things like religion, local community, family, tribes, gangs and other such things. By the way, this is how it’s been for most of history. At the end of the thirty years’ war however (treaty of Westphalia, 1648), came the rise of the nation-state. Since then, the state has been who has cared for it’s people, protected them, advanced their interests and gave them identity. People no longer trust their states. And because of modern technology (internet, cell phones, PCs etc.) they don’t have to.

We have interred an interesting age, one where the old, nation-state centered ideologies are falling away to be replaced by these primary loyalties. The US has been largely shielded so far from this fragmentation, but it’s not probable that will last much longer. We are seeing increasing division in the US, on the surface this appears to be a confrontation of ideologies (left-wing vs. right-wing), but I would propose that there are deeper things at work here then simply politics. I would say that the bone of contention has nothing really to do with politics, but people’s worldview, embodied in the primary loyalties I just mentioned. America has, over the years become increasingly diverse. You will be told that this diversity is a strength: it’s not. When push comes to shove, people are going to stand, not with their government or nation-state, but their religion, family, tribe, gang or ethnic group. Diversity drives fragmentation.

This decline of the nation-state will be the story of the 21st century. This is the direction the world is going in, those who recognize it will be ahead of the game, those who don’t will be like the people of Rome who, as their empire was falling appart and being overun with barbarians, said that Rome was invincible, and could never fall.

Peter Beaumont goes for a Holt’s battlefield tour of southern Lebanon:

Cruising through the serene green wadis that connect south Lebanon to the Litani river to the north, the commander explains what happened at the end of the last war. “We knocked out three of their tanks on the first day, as they tried to enter,” he explained at a turn-off by the village of al-Qantara. “But after they entered the wadi, we knew they were going for the river and had to be stopped. So we called out to all the special forces anti-tank teams in the area. And they all swarmed the wadi. Boys would set up and wait for the tanks, fire off their rounds and then pull back. Then they would pull back a kilometre or so down the wadi and wait for them again.”

According to Israeli military reports, after the first and last tanks were hit by rocket fire or mines, killing the company commander, the 24 tanks were essentially trapped inside a valley, surrounded on all sides and pinned down by mortars, rockets and mines. Eleven tanks were destroyed and the rest partially damaged and Israel lost at least 12 soldiers.

Go read the rest; there’s a fair amount of speculation of the informed sort, and an appearance from Andrew Exum opining that the reinforced UNIFIL has succeeded in moving Hezbollah away from the border, rather as it was meant to. Actually, the reinforced UNIFIL should surely be counted as one of the unexpected successes of the last few years – especially if you remember all the yelling at the time.

However, this may be less important than it appears, especially if the Hezbollah guy’s account of their tactics in 2006 is representative – there’s no reason why they couldn’t keep doing that every kilometre, and indeed that’s what the original idea of a screen of small groups of men with guided anti-tank weapons was meant to do in front of the main NATO armies in Germany (remember this post and Stephen Biddle’s analysis?)

Further, the whole concept of a buffer force assumes that both sides would rather not fight, but that neither is willing to make the first move – that a classic security dilemma is operating. If one or both parties are determined to initiate more violence, though, this breaks down. And it’s worrying to see how a lot of Israeli commentary about 2006 has changed over time – in the first 18 months or so, there was a lot of frankness around. The war had clearly been a failure, and Hezbollah had surprised everyone by defending southern Lebanon effectively. Roughly since Gaza, there’s been a denialist phase – a bit like David Lloyd’s crack that “we flippin’ murdered them” after the England cricket team ran out of time trying to beat Zimbabwe. A lot of stuff was blown up in Beirut, and if it wasn’t for those pathetic politicians, we’d have won. You know the pattern.

This won’t be a substantive post, but more a notice to myself to build one. A seriously under-reported story on the global guerrilla beat is that the Nigerian government has succeeded, at least for the moment, in either defeating the Niger Delta rebels or making deals with them.

It’s worth rolling back a little; time was when they were roaring about the rivers of Rivers State in RIBs with three or four huge Evinrude outboards, assaulting oil installations and demanding money, following a strategy that was based on the current situation of the oil market, including things like the latest hurricane sweeping towards the Gulf of Mexico, refinery stock drawdown – essentially, they followed the market for oil like IPE traders in London. Their faceless spokesman operated from a Hotmail account and a PAYG GSM phone somewhere in South Africa, usually.

Everyone, especially J-Ro, reckoned they were our insurgent future. The lumbering energy infrastructure, supposedly, could never be defended from persistent but random disruption aimed at its key network nodes. They certainly were a guerrilla navy that was tactically and operationally very effective, and whose leaders were pursuing an intelligent strategy; their technology was obviously of the moment.

But what happened, then? A key element, of course, was the price of oil. However, the relationship between the Brent index and the violence in the Delta wasn’t linear; as the price of oil rose, MEND was more able to cause trouble, but the Nigerian government and the oil companies had more money. They could spend it on soldiers, or on bribes. In the other direction, as the price of oil fell, the power of the insurgents to send bursts of panic into the market fell – but the Nigerian state would itself be weaker, and the pool of recruits wider.

Crucially, the demand for oil fell; this is possibly more important than its price. Here’s me in August 2008 on this subject. As an oil-bombing insurgent, it’s not so much the price that you’re interested in as your ability to cause trouble. Much of the industrialised world has passed its peak demand for oil; the US may have done, or it may be the recession. We will only know in hindsight. This means that the oil market is structurally less sensitive.

This is, of course, less to the point if MEND was indeed a new kind of rebellion. I rather doubted this; it always struck me as a fight for a share of export revenues. Oil, as resources go, is remarkably suited to landlordism. Its extraction is capital-intensive, not labour intensive; much of the work is done by expatriate specialists. And, crucially, it helps to run an artificially high exchange rate, which is an excellent way for an elite to loot a country. As a robber elite, most of what you want in the way of goods are imported, and most of what you want in the way of the capital account is an export. You want to get your money out. This also tends to destroy local industries and favour importers; especially importers who need to get a licence from you.

This, and the back story of the rebellion, suggested that the main aim was what they said it was – to extract oil revenues from the Governor’s gut. Unlike tension in the oil market, the money you raise from high oil prices can be stored for later use; the government deployed it this summer, both for force and for persuasion.

I hope this post can expand to take in more information; I’d like to know more about how it happened. I do know that some of the rebel leaders’ men paraded through Port Harcourt getting drunk and shooting in the air before piling their rifles. But that’s about it.

An American PR man in Afghanistan speaks some Pashto. Actually, the fact he speaks some Pashto is the news he’s currently engaged in pushing on the press. As David Petraeus says, they managed to teach noddy German to hordes of US servicemen going there in peacetime. More to the point, the British army managed to slurp chunks of German into its own culture.

Looking back at this post from June, 2005 – and wasn’t the summer of 2005 a fucking joy? – it looks a lot like nobody really wants to do this. Which mirrors the strategy with uncanny precision. Bureaucracy knows; if you want information, measure what you’re actually doing.

Lind has written an interesting article here on light infantry tactics as an answer in Afghanistan.

Remember those Tuareg uranium guerrillas? Back in the summer of 2007, just before the crash, they were busy raiding Chinese prospectors and intriguing with both the French and the Nigerien government. And blogging, ISTR, on their Thuraya satphones.

Now look what’s happened: they’ve been recruited by the Algerians to fight Al-Qa’ida, or more specificially the GSPC, the local affiliate. Few things can be as valuable these days as a good Al-Qa’ida affiliate; I can almost imagine a Mouse that Roared scenario, where some bunch of accidental guerrillas decide to set up as Al-Q so they can make the government an offer to crush them. Almost as good as having communists used to be.

Meanwhile, has anyone else noticed that the West Yorkshire Police has become an actor in Somali politics?

A judge allowed publication for the first time of a deal which saw the Foreign and Home Offices pay the African state, which has no diplomatic ties with London, to seize 29-year-old Mustaf Jama in the desert two years ago, close to his warlord father’s headquarters.

The ambush of Jama’s Land Rover by 15 militiamen nearly failed when a pilot, hired to fly the captured gangster to Dubai, tried to back out, thinking that he was caught up in an anti al-Qaida operation which could bring reprisals.

You could say that again. And Dubai, of course, always Dubai; it’s the opposite of the Somali badlands, a chaotic warzone with too much marble flooring.

In other news, has anyone else noticed that the word “Hezbollah” in Iran essentially translates as “wingnuts”?

Wired reviews a book on the media of the Middle East, The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday. Well, even pirates have press spokesmen these days. It sounds like it could be interesting, but it strikes me that this piece by Tom Griffin about trolls sponsored by various Middle Eastern actors is its critical, rebellious twin.

The GLORIA Center at IDC gathered about thirty Israeli bloggers and members of Israel’s foreign and defense ministries for an informal gathering to evaluate the blogging effort during the Gaza war, new techniques and future challenges. Topics discussed included lessons of the Gaza battle for blogalogical warfare, live-blogging, new technologies and interactions with government. Bloggers delivered short presentations on their personal experiences and discussed future plans for cooperation….

Who wouldn’t want to be a fly on the wall? It practically glows with a radioactive mixture of trollishness, self-righteousness, and raging, thinktank/intern ambition. A weaponised version of MessageSpace. You’ll laugh; you’ll cry; you’ll read up on freeze-distilling your own hydrogen peroxide to escape all this hideousness!

As always, if you want a practical policy recommendation, make tools. A little investment in annoying javascript thingies pays off hugely by improving the productivity of your trolls; and it doesn’t have to be technically very interesting.

In Italy, meanwhile, they’ve got a truly impressive legislation tracker going.

It allows one to follow an act in its path across the two perfectly symmetrical chambers (La Camera and Il Senato), from its presentation as a proposal, to its final approval.

It tracks all the votations, highlighting rebel voters. It tracks who presented an act, and wether as a first-signer or a co-signer. It also tracks speeches of officials on given acts.

Access to textual documents related to an act is easy and documents can be emended by users online, using an innovative shared comments system (eMend), that allows discussions on a particular act to take place.

Users can describe the acts, using their own words, in a wiki subsystem, acts are ratable and commentable, too.

All acts are tagged with consistent arguments by an editorial board, and that allows to know what’s going on and who’s doing what in relation to a subject.

An event-handling subsystem allows the generation of news. Whenever an act is presented, it moves towards approval or refusal, a votation takes place, someone gives a speech or anything worth noticing happens, news are generated. A dedicated web page and a customized daily e-mail, containing just the news related to those acts, politicians or arguments monitored by the user, allows him/her to follow almost in real time what’s going on.

Pretty cool; better than anything we’ve got. And, I think, that’s much more a piece of real citizen technology than any of the TwitBook propaganda apps, which are all about creating a sense of participation; possibly, they actually exist in order to provide that sense as a substitute for real participation, in order to prevent it.

If that’s not hardcore enough for you, the Make blog has a HOWTO on listening to satellites.

People are talking about using “cyberwar” to assist the Iranian opposition.

Let’s put some of our new cyber-warfare capabilities to the test, quietly and covertly of course, to disrupt Tehran’s ability to shut off the flow of information to Iranians and between them

This makes no sense at all, even less sense than “cyberwar” usually does. What can a cyberwar capability actually do? Well, it usually means either spying, or else running a distributed denial of service attack on someone. Here’s the first problem. Making the Iranian government’s web site load slowly is not the most fearsome threat that has been issued since the Melian Dialogues.

If you know which bit of it to harass, that is. It looks like the Supreme Leader supports Ahmedinejad, the Grand Ayatollah wants a recount, the militia and the secret police are doing the dirty work, and the ordinary ministerial government and the army are keeping as far out of it as they can. So you’ve got some targeting issues as well. After all, it’s far from impossible that a state-backed forum could become a centre of opposition – this is rather what happened to the Internet itself.

Further, you’ve got to understand the technology. When things like this happen, the place to go is Renesys, which tracks changes in the Internet Routing Table. Their data shows that…well. It’s hard to say what it shows. To be brief, Iran has competing ISPs and mobile phone operators but transit – i.e. wholesale connectivity to the broader Internet – is only available from a state monopoly, which appears to be the locus of censorship.

Here’s the interesting bit; rather than mass-censor great chunks of it, or try to implement fine-grained monitoring, they have chosen to cut the available capacity and, oddly, to route their international traffic down an overland link to Turkey rather than into their submarine cable landings.

Many explanations are possible. It could be that a bigger blackout was planned, but bungled. It could be that they are unwilling to cut themselves out of the Internet. It could be that they want some traffic to move, so as to spy on it. It could be that they don’t want to look like they turned off the Internet. It could even be that the network operations engineers sabotaged the censorship – if there isn’t quite enough bandwidth, there’s a high probability your first attempt to load www.margbarkhamenei.org wouldn’ t work, which might satisfy the ultimate Pointy-Headed Boss, but someone who was really determined to get through might well in the end.

Pakistan tried to cut off YouTube, and accidentally routed all the world’s mindless Web video into one server deep inside Pakistan Telecoms. Burma simply vanished from the routing table last year, before briefly re-appearing; no-one ever knew why. Was it a maintenance script still running? Did they need urgent data transfer? For what – perhaps a bank batch process to move the General’s money? Or was someone holed up in the network-operations centre, like the radio operator of a sinking ship?

Either way, in this case, the only possible cyberwar option as we understand the word cyberwar would be to…what? Hack the routers and turn the transit bandwidth back up? Well. It would be a pretty legendary exploit if true. But it would be very difficult, and the natural counter-game would be just to turn the power off or null-route everything.

And the rest is hammering on government Web sites, which achieves nothing but to burn up the remaining bandwidth available for getting out the truth. Get off the line, we need it for more important traffic.

But despite all this, the US seems to have a sensible strategy. It appears that the US State Department had a word with Twitter to put off their maintenance. It wasn’t just them – there had been chatter on NANOG for a couple of days about NTT America taking a day off in the middle of a revolution. I’m sure it must have helped. And Microsoft and Yahoo! have apparently suspended some of their services there as “a protest”.

You could be back in the 1950s suddenly. Jazz and abstract expressionism as a kind of war, and you have to say it beats the other kind. I think I said that the Iranians were beating us for today’s records and Marlboros – that is, WLAN – in Afghanistan.

This raises a question, though. How do we aid others to reach the Internet in tyrannical conditions? We have good techniques for encrypting and source-spoofing traffic – oddly enough, we had to fight for them against the US in the 1990s. But without backhaul connectivity you can do nothing.

Obviously, it’s got to be a radio solution, and it’s got to be a satellite one. I find it hard to imagine trying to spread Inmarsat or Hughes devices, although a major market for them is the Middle East. It would, however, be a cool idea to have a satellite or two dedicated to open communications. The world is increasingly full of satellite antennas.

If Brazilian radio hams can use old US Navy satellites, there ought to be a small constellation of civilian open relay sats – the uplink cost would protect it against spam, after all. Now that’s what I call cyber war – it is, after all, what everyone who actually thinks expects of us.