ubiwar . conflict in n dimensions

Interesting double-header in today’s Times, the real, London one that is. First, a not particularly revealing but PR-worthy interview with Jonathan Evans, head of MI5. More diverting is the accompanying item that traces “Why MI5 comes out of the shadows“:

This new spirit of openness reflects a remarkable ideological shift, with its origins in the Spycatcher debacle of 1985. The revelations of “bugging and burgling” by Peter Wright, the former assistant director of MI5, did huge damage to the service. The Government’s efforts to silence Wright compounded the catastrophe.

That experience convinced many in the secret world that public relations were as important to this as to any other branch of government, and that a degree of public scrutiny could be tolerated so long as it did not undermine secret sources or compromise operational efficiency.

Cold War espionage was a battle between professional spies, taking place at a distance from daily life in Britain. The war against terrorism has brought the public much closer to the action: for good operational reasons, MI5 needs members of the public to feel comfortable calling its telephone number with information, and for that, it needs a visible public profile.

Recruitment to the world of intelligence traditionally relied on the old-boy network, in which informal recruiters would tap the shoulder of a likely candidate, who tended to be white, male and upper-middle class. Today the ideal recruit is more likely to be Muslim and female, recruited not by some Oxbridge don with a nod and a wink, but through the internet, where both MI5 and MI6 maintain websites.

Not just the recruitment outreach, but MI5 in particular has quietly been talking to academia and stakeholders, both to canvass opinion and expertise but also to share the same. The equation is somewhat unequal at present but these are early days. Every time I have conversations with the security services they say, “Well, what do you want from us?”. The response, every time? “Data”. There are currently two chances of that - slim, and fat - but the times they are a-changin’.

Thanks to Matt Armstrong for his invitation to attend (by phone) the Journalist’s Roundtable precursor to next week’s symposium, The Smith-Mundt Act of 1948: A Discourse to Shape America’s Discourse. It finished mere minutes ago and was an interesting insight, for a Limey outsider like me, into the workings of US public diplomacy, specifically the theoretical and practical issues arising from the Smith-Mundt Act. All readers of MountainRunner will be well aware of Matt’s mission to reconsider the Act in order to re-energise and improve American efforts to communicate not only with the world, but with its own population.

The remit of the symposium, and today’s roundtable generally, is as follows:

The 1948 Smith-Mundt Act was originally written to ensure reliable and sufficient funding for public diplomacy efforts by the Department of State; however the perceived domestic conditions when the Act was passed no longer exist. Many believe that the Act inhibits United States information activities and cripples our ability to relay the truth outside the US.   Additionally, the act has been systematically and methodically misinterpreted, misapplied and misunderstood so badly that it even inhibits US military information activities globally.  Is it time to revisit Smith-Mundt to understand its intended purposes and consider revision or rescinding?  What reforms are necessary to enable the US government to engage in the global media environment?  How important are US government information and outreach programs to our national security?

An ambitious programme, no doubt. Although some of today’s conversation was impenetrable to anyone outside the Beltway it has got me thinking more about the role of public diplomacy in general, propaganda, and what Matt calls America’s “bifurcated engagement”. I’m looking forward to seeing what comes out of next week’s meeting, but you may see (real) comment from Spencer Ackerman, Craig Hayden, Steve Corman and Matt in the meantime. I defer to them in such matters.

Anyway, a fascinating hour and a half, even if I had little to contribute myself. And, for the record, the muzak assailing the ears of those of us on the phones was nothing to do with me. I’ve spent nearly four hours over the last two days attempting to talk to my cellphone provider, and I’ve had quite enough of piped music this week…

My mole at Wanabehuman has been kind enough to pass on this story from today’s Independent, Wannabe suicide bombers beware: Chris Morris movie gets go-ahead [also in The Guardian].  Non-British readers might not be familiar with the raz0r-sharp Morris, so I’ve shamelessly copy-and-pasted the entire article. I can’t vouch for its veracity, as Ms. Roberts seems to have copied much of the article from a press release that was circulating last autumn, picked up by Warren Ellis amongst others. But it’s too early for April Fools, and the debacle in Gaza has blown the lid off the silly season, so I’m going to take a punt on this and stand by its truthfulness.

By Geneviève Roberts

He has persuaded MPs to campaign to keep the fictitious drug “cake” off the streets, and musician Phil Collins to warn children against paedophiles while wearing a “Nonce Sense” T-shirt. Now the satirist Chris Morris is tackling his most controversial topic yet: wannabe suicide bombers.

Morris’s film, which has the working title Four Lions, explores the “farce” of terrorism and is funded by FilmFour. It goes into production this summer, after a year of delays caused by funding difficulties over fears that it was too contentious, and is expected to be in cinemas by the end of the year. The production company Warp Films said the film, which Morris spent three years researching, “understands how terrorism relates to testosterone. It understands jihadis as human beings. And it understands human beings as innately ridiculous.”

Deirdre Steed, who worked with Morris to secure funding for the film, said the satirist, who fronted The Day Today and Brass Eye, has spoken to terrorism experts, imams, police, secret services and hundreds of Muslims to research the film.

“Even those who have trained and fought jihad report the frequency of farce,” she said. “At training camps, young jihadis argue about honey, cry for their mums, shoot each other’s feet off, chase snakes and get thrown out for smoking. A minute into his martyrdom video, a would-be bomber looks puzzled and says ‘what was the question again?’ On Millennium eve, five jihadis set out to ram a US warship. They slipped their boat into the water and carefully stacked it with explosives. It sank.”

Ms Steed said terrorist cells share the same group dynamics as stag parties and five-a-side football teams. “There is conflict, friendship, misunderstanding and rivalry,” she said. “Terrorism is about ideology, but it’s also about berks.

“Four Lions is a funny, thrilling fictional story that illuminates modern British jihad with an insight beyond anything else in our culture. It plunges us beyond seeing these young men as unfathomably alien. It undermines the folly of just wishing them away or alienating the entire culture from which they emerge. As Spinal Tap understood heavy metal and Dr Strangelove the Cold War, Four Lions understands modern British jihadis.”

The project, which Morris has described as showing the “Dad’s Army side to terrorism”, has suffered a year of delays, and was refused funding as a television project by the BBC, amid speculation that the subject was too controversial. But Morris remained determined that it should go into production. He asked the public to show their support by offering £25 towards the funding of the film, in return for the chance to be an extra in the comedy.

Then, on 30 October, Morris announced to fans: “We’ve had some good funding news which means we won’t be asking you to back your generous offer with hard cash.”

FilmFour confirmed it will be backing the film and yesterday said it will be produced this year. A spokeswoman said Morris had always envisaged the project as a feature film rather than a piece for television and that FilmFour “had been involved from the beginning of the development process”.

Morris has previously acknowledged that “some may find poking fun at terrorists offensive”. But, he said: “Most of us would dearly love to laugh in the face of our worst fears. Why aren’t we laughing at terrorists? Because we don’t know how to, until now.”

Contrary to most blogs’ year-end round-ups that highlight the previous year’s most successful posts, I thought I’d link to a few Ubiwar posts that I think should have got a few more hits than they did. It’s probably because they’re crap, but here they are anyway, and in no particular order:

Can War Ever Be Turing’d? (20 April 2008)

Mining the Digital (28 April 2008)

The Virtual Jihadi Returns! (20 July 2008)

COIN Begins at Home? (19 July 2008)

Jihad Fever Pitch (29 April 2008)

Macroterrorism and Black Swans (11 June 2008)

Inscription Earth/Arbre (23 October 2008)

Unmanned Systems and the Accident (3 June 2008)

On Accidents, Engines and Industry (11 October 2008)

Al-Qaeda - the New Luther Blissett? (22 April 2008)

Law Enforcement in Virtual Worlds (16 may 2008)

OK, OK, that’s enough, you get the picture.

Thanks to Mark for sending on the link to Stanton Coerr’s new article in the Marine Corps Gazette, Fifth-Generation War: Warfare versus the nonstate. The piece is a stab at framing the future development of the global jihad and other possible conflicts within a tweaked version of 5GW that Coerr calls QTW - the Quantum Theory of War.

QTW draws on various ‘quantum’ theories of matter and process to analogise a model for 5GW. At the centre of Coerr’s concentric rings model is the ‘radical core belief’, around which orbit layers of conviction that dissipate as their distance from the atomic core increases. This is an interesting model, predicated on the idea that “entities shed energy as they move away from center, or gain it as they move closer, yielding probabilistic “valences” rather than predictable orbits.”

So far, so good. This would appear to match characteristics of distributed adversarial networks, howsoever we understand that term, but the idea’s not really developed in the article. By the end I was no wiser as to how this “new model” was any different from fairly well-established notions of the coalescence of intent around the “idea” rather than a kinetic centre of gravity, etc. In trying to go beyond Lind and Boyd, Coerr seems merely to have been seduced by the  “quantum”-ness of his metaphor, which substitutes for any real innovation. (A lack of intellectual depth is somewhat betrayed by the conflation of the terms “quantum mechanics”, “quantum theory”, and “quantum physics”, as well as an inability to spell either Schrödinger or Gödel correctly.)

I don’t wish to be too harsh on LtCol Coerr. He, after all, is far better positioned to both comment on, and to theorise, the nature of warfare. Also, it’s not as if the realities and potentialities he describes are incorrect. Indeed, the opposite is true, and I largely agree with his reading of the trajectories of future conflict (although I would suggest that the state is far from dead yet …) My point is merely that the relatively uncritical transference of a highly complex model from the sub-atomic to the macro-level is problematic. Let’s not forget that Niels Bohr said, “If you aren’t confused by quantum physics, then you really haven’t understood it.” I have no doubt Coerr is aware of this, even if his article appears not to pay quite enough heed to the counter-intuitive nature of the scientific models on which he draws.

I quite like the idea of “probabilistic valences” as a way of conceptualising the complexities of human behaviour in a 5GW environment but I wonder at its utility and real validity. Several warnings were recently voiced during the CTlab symposium on Chaoplexic Warfare about the dangers of the subjective application of physical models (scientific paradigms?) to the actions and psychologies of humans in conflict situations. Coerr’s piece seems to illustrate this problem and, whilst he fits in quite genially with the chaoplexic trope, for example, and the netwar framework, I can’t see how he has advanced the debate. An interesting paper though - go read.