I’ve got a new post up at Complex Terrain Lab:

On Wednesday 11 June 2008 the Frontline Club in London hosted a discussion evening, Media Talk: Assassination and Insurgency - Are the Taliban Winning? Moderated by Nazanine Moshiri of Al Jazeera, the panel brought together Alastair Leithead (BBC), James Fergusson (journalist and author), James Appathurai (NATO spokesman), John D. McHugh (photojournalist) and, via Skype from Kandahar, Mawlavi Abdulsalam Zaeef (ex-Taliban ambassador to Pakistan).

Read the full article here.

The folks at RAND have been busy, with another COIN report out today: Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan by Seth G. Jones, the fourth volume in the RAND Counterinsurgency series [research brief here]. The tone of the report partly reflects what I’ve been hearing the last couple of days about operations in Afghanistan - “comprehensive organisational dysfunction” sticks in my mind - although Jones concentrates more on capacity-building and security security reform:

This study explores the nature of the insurgency in Afghanistan, the key challenges and successes of the U.S.-led counterinsurgency campaign, and the capabilities necessary to wage effective counterinsurgency operations. By examining the key lessons from all insurgencies since World War II, it finds that most policymakers repeatedly underestimate the importance of indigenous actors to counterinsurgency efforts. The U.S. should focus its resources on helping improve the capacity of the indigenous government and indigenous security forces to wage counterinsurgency. It has not always done this well. The U.S. military - along with U.S. civilian agencies and other coalition partners - is more likely to be successful in counterinsurgency warfare the more capable and legitimate the indigenous security forces (especially the police), the better the governance capacity of the local state, and the less external support that insurgents receive.

Small Wars Journal alerted us to a Charlie Rose interview with our Insurgency Research Group colleague Colonel H.R. McMaster (soon to be General). SWJ has a short YouTube video but I’ve tracked down the full, hour-long version, which also includes an interview with Philip Bobbitt, plugging his new book, Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century. Bobbitt will be launching the UK edition of Terror and Consent at the London International Institute for Strategic Studies tonight, which I’m unfortunately going to miss.

I’ve had a few problems getting this video to stream consistently, but it may just be my connection today. If anyone finds an alternative source please let me know.

Following on from my last post about unmanned systems, John Robb tells us about a new unmanned aerial vehicle sniper system from Sagetech:

The TAPSS system [Tenacious Automatic Precision Shooting System] is much more accurate than a traditional human sniper team for both the first and second shots fired … for a range of 1500m. A traditional sniper weapon’s maximum range is typically limited to 600-800 m. Kills have been recorded at longer ranges than this, but it is typically considered to be a “lucky shot”. The TAPSS automated firing system pushes the useful range of the sniper weapon out to 1500 m.

Each 50- caliber ammunition round will likely cost from $4 to $8, as opposed to a cost of $60,000 for each AGM-114 Hellfire missile. UAV sniper will also have a relatively large number of stowed kills; about 100 50-caliber rounds versus 2-4 Hellfire missiles for other UCAVs.

John sees this and similar technology as elements of the inevitable development of ‘cloud airpower’. You can certainly ditch the pastoral euphemism here - this is further ‘Death from the Sky’. As David Axe wrote in response to Matt Armstrong’s original piece on the problems of unmanned systems:

Problem is, much of the world already associates U.S. military robots with death, thanks to the use of Predator drones as aerial assassins in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia — and the military has no plans to scale back these sneaky, lethal attacks.

It  would seem so. Perhaps it should scale up its consideration of the potential psychological and strategic effects of the technology first.

Judging by this video (”Marines under attack, crying for their lives”) it’s not just civilians who react badly when under fire from an unseen assailant. The comments on this video are as puerile and unhelpful as they usually are on YouTube, but at least everyone recognises the fear. This mostly manifests as ‘kill all f***ng cowardly ragheads’ - what passes for standard YouTube debate - but the power to elicit strong fright responses is undeniable, no matter which foot the boot is on:

New report from the Advanced Research and Assessment Group of the UK Defence Academy by Adam Goodman, Informal Networks and Insurgency in Iraq [.pdf]. Key points from the report:

• Informal networks are present at all levels in Iraq and they also exert their influence internationally.

• Stopping the activities of various militias would not put an end to the activity of informal networks in the country. Informal political and religious networks are deeply embedded within the fabric of Iraqi society.

• Despite the influence of sectarianism on Iraqi politics, various informal networks have employed sectarianism as a means of furthering their political and policy interests. Therefore, it is extremely unlikely that even drastic solutions such as partitioning the country will bring the insurgency to an end. Cross-sectarian political alliances and intra-sectarian conflicts indicate that politics takes precedence over ideology.

• The influence of informal political and religious networks has prevented the nascent Iraqi state from defining a concept of national interest in a way that is acceptable to even the groups participating in the political process. At the same time, cross-sectarian alliances aimed at preserving a unitary state have failed to agree on anything other than maintaining the unity of the state.

• The Iraqi insurgency symbolizes the beginning of the era of post-international politics which is characterized by global wars for creating political spaces rather than wars for territory and the national interest. The era of post-international politics will be turbulent because informal networks often try to create their own spheres of authority which transcend national boundaries.

[Cross-posted from Complex Terrain Lab]

On 21 May, Daniel Kimmage, Regional Analyst for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, spoke to the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence at King’s College London. The basis for the talk was his recently published study The Al-Qaeda Media Nexus: The Virtual Network Behind the Global Message [.pdf] which received a fair amount of attention in the blogosphere and beyond. He is also author, with Kathleen Ridolfo, of The War of Images and Ideas: How Sunni Insurgents in Iraq and Their Supporters Worldwide are Using The Media [.pdf].

Kimmage is worth listening to and reading for many reasons, but the principal advantage Kimmage has over most commentators and analysts on the subject is that he is fluent in Arabic. This provides him with real insight into the practical workings of jihadist media, whilst most of us observe from at least one linguistic remove. His sample in this case was 446 outlets identified in July 2007, of which 78% concentrated on Iraq, in particular the Islamic State of Iraq and Ansar al-Sunnah.

In Kimmage’s analysis, jihadist media have developed media products with consistent and systematic branding, using virtual media production and distribution entities (MPDEs) to link a plethora of groups under the global jihadist umbrella. This strategy, mirroring conventional media structures, imparts a degree of legitimacy and credibility to jihadist narratives, as well as facilitating control over the ideological content of the ‘message’.

It is this desire to control media output that Kimmage identifies as the principal reason why jihadist groups are not at the cutting-edge of technology use, in contrast to much of the reporting and analysis to the contrary. The use of ‘web 2.0′ technologies, such as social networks and video sharing sites, threatens message control and is therefore actively discouraged by jihadist groups. As previously noted, this is a fairly traditional approach to media, one that eschews the reflexivity and interactivity of available technology in favour of one-way message propagation. Essentially, it is a propaganda machine.

Kimmage concluded by examining the origin of foreign fighters in Iraq, the majority of which come from media-repressive regimes such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Libya. He posed this speculative question as a result: could a freer, more interactive internet be the secret weapon against al-Qaeda’s ideology? We are reaching a point where virtual claims and kinetic actions are increasingly divergent - advertisement of this trend could reduce internet radicalisation and help stem the flow of online jihadist rhetoric.

My gut feeling is that this would be a sensible move. The challenge of convincing repressive regimes to open up the virtual media space is a difficult one, and there is also no guarantee that a bottom-up, ‘liberalising’ debate would emerge in those societies in which jihadist media flourishes. Jihadist forums are not exactly welcoming of ideological challenges to their chosen stances, and increased access to the internet and the lifting of censorship is unlikely to be met with analagous social reform either. I am reminded of a notice pinned to the wall of a downtown Cairo internet cafe I occasionally visited: “Our patrons are kindly asked not to mention any of these subjects whilst using the internet: sex, religion, politics.”

Kimmage’s study is an interesting one, with undoubted value but, and he freely admits this, is of limited scope. Jihadist internet use is by no means restricted to the Arabic language, and his sample was kept deliberately manageable in size and time. His assertion that the sophistication of jihadists’ use of internet technology is often overstated has some traction, but equally ignores the fact that those wishing to employ counterstrategies have barely even got to grips with the internet as a contestable space. This is changing, particularly in the U.S. military, but there is a long way to go, conceptually and operationally.

I also find myself thinking that there is an opposite underestimation at work here. The nature of the internet is such that - and I believe a lot of insurgents and terrorists know this - once material is on the internet, it tends to take unpredictable paths. This in itself constitutes the exercise of a strategic choice that this study and others miss: a lot of material is deliberately and wilfully produced just so it can be remixed and reworked by whoever chooses to - this is categorically not an attempt to straitjacket the ‘message’ within a normative media framework. The propaganda of the deed thrives in this viral, memetic environment, which might even be a force-multiplier in the global insurgency.

I wish Daniel luck in finding new employment after the recent restructuring of RFE/RL, and look forward to further work in this field. I suspect a new study might back up many of his findings but also, in the ever-changing and dynamic global information ecology, open up unexpected avenues of research into insurgent media.

Via Sic Semper Tyrannis 2008 comes this David Kilcullen PowerPoint presentation, given at a RAND Corporation Insurgency Board meeting on 8 May 2008 in Washington DC, Dinosaurs versus Mammals: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Adaptation in Iraq, 2007. There are too many abbreviations and acronyms for me to decipher right now, so I’m just putting this out there for the record [click through for the slideshow]:

I gave up reading Robert Scoble’s blog Scobleizer some time ago. Far be it from me to criticise the 31st most popular blog in the world, I just don’t go for Scoble’s frenetic techno-evangelism or the febrile adulation he elicits in some quarters. His name might not mean much to many regular readers of this blog but what he says matters to an awful lot of people. He has a knack of spotting technological trends, mainly due to his absolute immersion in new media and technology and, let’s face it, he’s ultra-bright and totally dedicated to his cause.

Alexander van Elsas wrote an excellent piece on mobile phone functionality in which he referenced a recent post by Scoble, Why Google News has no noise. Scoble’s thesis is that he is able to spot trends in news before the main web news carriers, Google News for mainstream news, and TechMeme for tech news, before either they or their readers can. The enabling media for Scoble’s prognostications are social aggregators like FriendFeed and microblogging services like Twitter. I won’t go into the details of exactly what these are but essentially they are services delivered direct to the device of your choice which provide frequent updates of what your friends and acquaintances are doing, thinking, writing, at all hours of the day. With a lot of people in your network these alerts can be relentless.

Scoble likes this, as do many others, because it provides him with a background of noise which allows him to discern patterns in the network of social interaction across these services. Scoble is a journalist by background and inclination and, arguably, he is a new sort of journalist through his work at Scobleizer, and ’swimming in the noise’ these services provide is food and drink to someone of his bent:

So, how come services like Twitter and FriendFeed have so much noise? Who likes the noise? Who likes the news?

I like the noise. Why? Because I can see patterns before anyone else. I saw the Chinese earthquake happening 45 minutes before Google News reported it. Why? Because I was watching the noise, not the news.

This is an important and valid point. Scoble is watching the new news ‘wires’ to get a jump on the bigger outlets but also to discern the patterning in the information coming from across the globe. This process is aided by aggregative nodes which filter reports of activities into streamlined summaries of many people’s information. Once such example is ‘bridge blogging‘ which enables one bilingual individual to aggregate locally-generated ‘news’ in one language and to disseminate it in another. Scoble likes to avoid these nodes wherever possible but they serve a purpose, as any blogger will tell you.

Noise, in Scoble’s sense, is noise with information value, very different from the engineering sense in which noise is data without meaning, without semantic content. Scoble’s noise, like noise in the information theoretical sense has redundancy. This redundancy is what provides Scoble with the ability to detect patterns in the streams of Twitters and FriendFeeds coming his way. As a good journalist, he knows that just because fifty people propagate a meme (a troublesome term, but I’ll let it slide for now) doesn’t make it true, but he can see the drift of global conversation and concerns.

I’ve been toying with ideas of data, information and redundancy recently. About whether the physical nature of the internet, and the ways in which it transmits and reproduces digital data as a matter of course, could in some way constitute force-multipliers in the global insurgency (another troublesome term, as David Betz wrote yesterday). Does the fact that, once created, data continues to flow through the internet, somehow act to the benefit of the insurgent or terrorist sophisticated in the use of new media? I don’t mean the relative ease with which anyone can set up a website, or post a video of an IED explosion in Iraq. I mean the unpredictable course data takes once ‘released’ into the digital wild and its subsequent recontextualisation as actionable and significant information.

I suspect that it could do, although I’m not convinced it is yet happening, except perhaps in the sense of the deliberate viral spread of propaganda of the deed acts through visual media. One critical point is how (and whether) data is being recovered from parts of the internet and used somehow as a weapon or tool in whichever campaign or operation the individual or group is involved. Reconstituted ‘information bombs’.

See also:
Mining the digital
Global Information Flows

Update:

Oops, shoulda checked Zen’s feed first: Social Media: The Benefits of Twitter. He reckons it’s a great little tool, and even mentions Robert Scoble to boot. Should I take the plunge? Is the fact that both he and I have written about this today a function of memetic correspondence, or sheer coincidence? I dunno, but read why Zen likes it here.

Jeremy Kahn in Newsweek, War is the Answer: Sri Lanka’s leaders are testing a dangerous theory: that the best way to end a civil war is by winning it.

That’s not quite what Kahn argues at all, so boo! to the sub-editors at Newsweek for letting me down. What Kahn actually says is that although the government military and police have made significant gains over the last two years, against a relatively traditional Maoist-style insurgency, the LTTE is still a potent adversary. President Rajapaksa faces increasing political opposition within his own ranks, as well as an inflationary economy, external debt problems, and a general public tiring of the war.

Achieving [military] victory is still possible, analysts say. “If somehow [the government] can kill Prabhakaran, that would change the picture dramatically,” says one senior analyst for a Western NGO in Colombo. Barring that, if the Army can deliver a few significant victories before January, it may buy Rajapaksa enough good will among the Sinhalese to allow him to continue the fight. For that reason, security experts expect another major push before the rainy season begins in June.

But the best chance for peace, analysts agree, involves combining the military campaign with a political strategy to empower moderate Tamil politicians and deprive the LTTE of support. Most Tamils on the island oppose the Tigers’ calls for independence, though they do want more autonomy. Under a 1987 accord brokered by India, Sri Lanka passed a constitutional amendment that was supposed to transfer some powers to the provinces. But the Tigers refused to disarm as called for under the accord, and the amendment was never implemented in Tamil areas.

Seems eminently sensible, and fits the bill of a rounded COIN approach (if implemented) to the Sri Lankan situation. Kahn concludes:

Without a more serious effort to redress discrimination, however, many international commentators believe the military campaign can’t succeed. The fighting alone “cannot be the whole solution, because that alone won’t address the grievances of the minority community,” says Susan Hayward of the United States Institute of Peace in Washington. Unfortunately, Rajapaksa, who is surrounded by Sinhalese hardliners, has shown little interest in truly reaching out to the Tamils. Which means that while there may well be a military solution to Sri Lanka’s civil war, it probably isn’t this one.

Doesn’t quite suit the headline, methinks. Kahn presumably grasps the requirements of successful COIN, but his editors obviously do not.

Andrew Exum has an excellent article over at Arab Media & Society, The Spectacle of War: Insurgent video propaganda and Western response [also as .pdf].

… while the ponderous American defense bureaucracy has been slow off the mark, the enemy – the insurgent groups against which the U.S. has fought in both Iraq and Afghanistan – have proved more than proficient at the art of propaganda, media manipulation and shaping the way operations and events are perceived by enemy, friendly and neutral populations. In the same way, though the U.S. and its allies talk of the “comprehensive approach”, it is more often than not groups like Hizbullah and Jaish al-Mahdi who best understand military operations as part of a combined effort incorporating “political, military, diplomatic, economic and strategic communication” efforts.

To a large degree, though, the U.S. military cannot be blamed for being caught off-guard by their enemy’s sophistication in managing the way battles and campaigns are perceived. In the past two decades, insurgent, terrorist, and guerrilla groups in the Middle East have grown exponentially more sophisticated in the way they use the media available to them in order to affect the way battles are perceived. From the perspective of someone who studies military innovation, it is a remarkable achievement.

This paper focuses on the evolution of insurgent media operations in support of political-military objectives. Groups like the Taliban and Hizbullah did not start off, from the beginning, as sophisticated manipulators of popular perception. They learned, over time, how to shape the way in which military operations are perceived, and in the process, have taught Western militaries a valuable lesson in the nature of war itself.

Read the rest of the article here.

Similarly, Brigitte L. Nacos writes on Media Power and Terrorists at Complex Terrain Lab, with particular emphasis on Hezbollah:

… modern-day terrorist organizations’ impact on domestic and/or international spheres depends to a large extent on their ability to establish their own means of communications or find alternative modes to communicate their messages directly to friend and foe.

Without taking the centrality of communication in the terrorist calculus into account, counterterrorism cannot succeed.

The burning of TV stations in Beirut (Counterterrorism Blog)