It’s raining again…

Posted on 20 October 2009 by SJPONeill

..after a nice day yesterday, where I chopped most of the wood and filled up the shed, dried the carpets after they got caught out in the last storm, and recovered a dozen+ eggs from the chooks latest covert nest – maybe their yard is too big?

After all that – it was a fairly respectable wood pile that had accumulated over 2-3 months – my poor old body wasn’t up to the challenge of blogging, and even less so after Carmen slipped me a glass of wine over dinner (very nice too: steak, tabouli and cold roast vege salad with a rosemary and honey dressing). I was out to it on the couch (also very comfortable: they are two big flat-tops that I can easily stretch right out on, named Nimitz and Ark Royal) by the time the Monday movie started: I have brief flashes of Brit crims knocking each other off (The Take…?)before I negotiated the stairs to bed…

Anyway…

Coming Anarchy has an interesting item on media bias and reliability which has turned into a bit of a cable-bashing session. While I share the concern raised in the actual blog entry, I don’t have much time for the hobby-horsing in many of the comments. As per my own comment, the issues in the blog entry are how it is now: the internet and our ablility to self-publish pretty well whatever we want have decreased our reliance on the media for impartial information to the extent that most media outlets now have to follow commercial imperatives or go under: simply, they are now in the same ratings game as the rest of the media business; no longer the voices of knowledge and wisdom, but catalysts for people (‘the people’?) to further not only explore but contribute to an issue, for better or for worse…

Hence the Information Militia: informal, disorganised, often at cross purposes and following their own agendas even when in support of a common goal (have you ever noticed how a ‘common goal’ can have so many different meanings?) but a force none the less to be reckoned with. From Twitter to Crimestoppers to the most stridently hard left/right (is there really a difference or do the meet in the middle?) blogspace, we have access to growing mass of information upon which to make our own decisions, to shape and guide our actions and our worlds. The choise is ours whether we meekly accept that which is served up to us on a spoon, or take the plunge to ferret out as much supporting and contrary (what sort of loser only seeks that which agrees with them? Possibly we don’t want the answer to that question!) information to deal with.

So the first level of the Information Militia are those who feed information in; is the next level those who take that information, reprocess it and serve it up again, perhaps in support of a specific objective…?

Steven Pressfield is on the road this week and has reposted his One Tribe At A Time article to keep the dialogue alive. Of all the online discussion regarding the way ahead, this particular discussion is the first that I have seen that may be sowing the seeds of a successful campaign in Afghanistan (which would be a historical first!) . Key elements are:

Prevent Afghanistan from passing into a condition that would allow Al Qaeda to use it as a resource in creating threats to our security and national interests.

The best that we can hope for in Afghanistan is a “loose confederation of tribes.” Think of a congress composed of elder members of each tribe that comes to represent issues of import to that tribe at some set dates/times each year. The only hope for a “traditional” government is found in the bigger cities; but…Afghanistan is mostly tribal villages, not big cities. Such gatherings would not put an end to inter-tribal fighting, however, the tribes might be able to get some assistance from the central government for basic services and the like. Generally, the tribes don’t want the “modern” conveniences – they want to stay the way they are, but some can benefit from help with drilling wells, medical care, etc…

Adopt and implement NOW a campaign based upon direct integrated engagement with the tribes (‘the people’ in popular COIN parlance).

The catalyst behind this proposal is MAJOR Jim Gant’s One Tribe At A Time paper which articulates the Tribal Engagement Team concept although it will seem all too familiar to anyone with knowledge of traditional ‘hearts and mind’s campaigns like the classic campaign waged in the Highlands of Vietnam by US Special Force in the 60s. This mission used to be SF bread and butter before the glitz of Special Operations took over in the 80s and 90s. Gen McCrystal has the ‘get out amongst the people bit right’; Jim Gant has provided the ‘how’ of this…small units, living with the tribes in an enduring and long-term relationship…Anyone wanting to do some background reading on this could do worse things than read Robin Moore’s The Green Berets – the very good book upon which the entertaining but conceptually accurate John Wayne movie was based…Here is someone who has read FM 3-24 and then adapted it to the current situation; hopefully the full text of this paper will be posted soon so that we can get our teeth into it instead of being fed these tempting titbits…

My last link today is to the developing discussion on The Strategist on historically incorrect war movies, initiated by King Arthur on the weekend…it’s a good discussion with a good nugget or two…and of course my comment above re The Green Berets movie will spark off some more…

The COIN drops…

Posted on 16 October 2009 by SJPONeill

…or is it just a penny…?

Previously in The World According To Me: “Over time some insurgents will tire of the constant harassment in the face of growing public confidence in government forces and disdain for the insurgents… encouraging THEM one by one to consider coming to the talking table…”

I picked this up on my way through Singapore last month, thinking that with Admiral Sandy Woodward of Falklands War fame as an advisor, it would be pretty good. Not only is it not, but I could also see why other commanders in the fleet were worried that Woodward, with limited aviation or amphibious experience, be the wrong guy for the job: once the plot puts to sea the whole premise is based on the ‘fact’ that the US Navy is the only service in the US DoD which helps the story along by skipping gayly around inconveniences like AWACs…I also think that the three unnamed Special Forces officers who allegedly advised on the story need to hand back any beers they received for ‘advice’ as the SF side is pretty weak as well. So the connection with COIN is…?

Without spoiling what story there is, a key assumption in the book is that the way to win an insurgency is to out-exasperate the opposition, i.e. harass them to the point of just giving up and going home…at the time of reading the book, these seemed like a great recipe for success for insurgents and difficult to beat from a COIN perspective – until I I reread the piece on the Information Militia this afternoon…could initiatives like Crimestoppers in a COIN/Stability campaign actually be the start of the Death of 1000 Cuts for an insurgency? Turning The War of the Flea on its head and subjecting the insurgents to an endless series of pinpricks and mossie bites until they have just had enough and start to consider their options…?

One thing I did like about Barracuda 945 is that the ending is not the righteous vengeance that one might have been expecting. Instead it presents a very left-field scenario which strikes at a core issue and not just a symptom – does that sound like something that might be drawn from FM 3-24 – even if the story does use major elements of national power to achieve the effect…?

I’ve commented a lot, as have many other commentators, on the apparent lack of strategic objectives for the war in Afghanistan. This summary came off one of the distribution lists I’m subscribed to; it states pretty clearly that al-Qaeda is still the primary raison d’etre for the war from a US point of view but one wonders how logical that really is…some things to think about:

The Taliban are not AQ; they may have supported and hosted them prior to 9/11 but are now probably not that impressed with all the attention that has drawn.

AQ are probably well-established in many other locations are the globe – where next after Afghanistan for the GWOT?

If there is any lesson to be learned by insurgents (as opposed to simple terrorists) from 9/11 and the London Tube bombings it is that such actions are more counter-productive for the ’cause’ – as Yamamoto feared, once you wake the sleeping dragon, it is damn difficult to put it back to bed…so AQ cells around the world are probably more discreet than to parade themselves openly in training camps as once was their wont.

These things being the case, then perhaps we need to reread FM 3-24 and ensure that such fundamentals remain in the 2010 version, and start to focus the campaign on ending the insurgency…if the aim is an AQ-free Afghanistan, then maybe we need to be casting off the dream of democracy for all and realistically start to look at ways of bring the Taliban to the table…carrot and stick…turn the war of the flea back on them…out-exasperate them until talking becomes the way better option to fighting. It is unlikely that we will be able to bring the Taliban (or any other significant Afghan group) to the table by force – didn’t work for Alexander, didn’t work for Victoria, didn’t work for Mikhail, and it wouldn’t have worked for Napoleon either if he had strayed in this direction….

Could we live with a stable Taliban in Afghanistan if that meant an al-Qaeda-free Afghanistan?

The Information Militia

Posted on 15 October 2009 by SJPONeill

…it was really great to see former Chief of Army, Lou Gardiner, fronting for the recent launch of Crimestoppers NZ (0800 555 111). This initiative is the silver lining from the cloud of the December 2007 Army Museum VC theft that brought General Lou and Lord Ashcroft together and got the idea fermenting (‘though the head of Crimestoppers NZ probably won’t have his own jet!!).

Initially I was a bit dubious about the whole idea of anonymous reporting and the opportunities to play ‘Dob Thy Neighbour‘ but I’ve been following the news reports this week and even if the Kiwi version is only half as effective as the UK one, that is still a 10% dent in the crime stats which is pretty respectable by anyone’s standards. More power to Crimestoppers and it will be interesting to visit in a few months to see how the stats are panning out. In the meantime, I exhort everyone to pop across to Crimestoppers and plant a few words of encouragement on the Crimestoppers Blog. Consider this your personal contribution to domestic Info Ops for 2009: the more obvious public support there is, the more likely it is that ordinary people will use the site….away you go…

Defence Capability Centre 033 small

This mobile signpost is in one of the display areas at the Defence Capability Centre at Shrivenham – it was in this complex, which is absolutely packed with big boys toys for ambient effect, that the CLAW was conducted this year. At first, I thought it looked kinda dumb and just a big invite for a couple of rounds of ‘Dob Thy Neighbour‘ and other forms of neighbourhood score-settling and mischief. But then I thought about it some more from an information perspective. Clearly in any COIN, Irregular Threat or Stability environment – and when you get down to it, domestic crime-fighting is as much about stability ops as is providing security in an operational theatre – there is a very real risk or kickback and retribution for ‘narks‘ and ‘informers‘ thus anonymity is not only good but essential.

This is probably easier to effect in an operational theatre where the onus of evidence might not be as rigid as in a civil courtroom even though the process of analysis and decision may be no less rigorous or difficult. I’m about 2/3 of the way through Australian General Jim Molan’s Running the War in Iraq (top read – highly recommended!!) and he goes into considerable detail on the rigour that his staff applied before approving prosecution of a target, often under very tight time imperatives (which is why it’s called Time Sensitive Targeting). Instead of having to satisfy a judge a a jury of his/her ‘peers’, the operational requirement is to satisfy a specific decision matrix based on four considerations: (from Running the War in Iraq) proportionality, humanity, discrimination and necessity. So in this environment, the painting of a picture based upon all source information, including that from anonymous sources, is more directly linked to an actionable result.

In a domestic criminal environment, there remains an equal or possibly greater burden of analysis and validation on information from anonymous sources which ultimately may have to satisfy a formal legal evidential chain. But over time, what we develop is a complex and detailed picture of a society and its environment that is constantly enhancing and evolving. The key to this, is the reliance upon informal, part-time, intermittent information sources…uh-oh, it’s THE PEOPLE again and these are whom I am starting to think of as the Information Militia…they are often not formally organised, particularly reliable, or often even that useful but every little titbit they provide adds to the picture, even (possibly not even intentionally) their place in it…a resource that supports the campaign, even while perhaps attempting to further its own myriads of ends…

And then I thought, wow, what if you took this model and applied it to Afghanistan – could this be where the support of the people might actually make a difference? It is not realisitic, although we keep on doing it, to expect ‘the people’ to just wake up one day and decide ‘Enough!’ and turn in all insurgents and their supporters. Not realistic at all, and we’ve all seen it happen one place or another, where the insurgents/criminals (the same or another mob) come back and dish out retribution. But what if we had Crimestoppers Afghanistan? Very specifically Crimestoppers and not any play on words like Talibanbusters, etc etc…the objective is to focus on crime and by very clearly unstated inference, insurgents because they are nothing but criminals…the Information Militia provide leads, feeds, rumours and whispers – all anonymously – which paint a picture which then informs counter-criminal operations – reducing crime is always a good start to getting the people onside – and as the picture evolves, oopsy-a-daisy, a counter-criminal feed ‘accidentally’ knocks off some insurgents…and on it goes…

Over time, as occurred in Northern Ireland, some insurgents will tire of the constant harassment in the face of growing public (‘the people’ again) confidence in government forces and disdain for the insurgents. I refer to ‘insurgents’ deliberately in order to decriminalise the Taliban associations, to encourage THEM to consider one by one coming to the talking table…

Feral the cat ran away…

Posted on 12 October 2009 by SJPONeill

…Feral the cat came back – not all stories have the desired ending…still, that will teach her to pick fights with big dogs who are just trying to be friendly…it also shows that cats, like children, come back much more docile after a couple of nights alone in the bush…

It was really nice to get home on Friday to find that Carmen had put the roof on the mancave and laid the foundation of the front deck…certainly saves me some work and puts us ahead of the game to get the damn thing finished – it’s a bit dark inside at the moment til we source some windows for the front but at least the rain isn’t getting in anymore and it has dried out quite nicely….

Mancave 001 Later on I think we’ll extend the deck out a bit further but we need something now as it is a bit of a step up to the door at the moment…when it’s done and after a bit more judicious pruning, the view will be something like:

Mancave 003 Obviously a little more groundwork required in the foreground but the plan is that this is where steps will go down to the next level – the hill down from the house is quite steep but has been terraced at some stage so it is possible to descend from level to level…If I cut down ALL the trees you could see the Raurimu Spiral at the left of the picture…

Have also been quite busy in the garden and we finally got a vege garden underway…the soil here is not very good to say the least being for the most part an unfriendly combination of clay and volcanic ash. There used to be mega-toitoi right up to the house and we have, over the years, pushed this right back and opened up the bush. One of the unexpected benefits of getting rid of the toitoi is that where it has been is actually good rich, well-drained soil. After a few hours hammering way with the rotary hoe, we flattened out the first of the toitoi humps and, on Saturday, got a range of veges into the ground. The plan is to extend a series of little vege patches down the path visible here:

Vege Garden In other blog news tonight…

Cheeseburger has an account of the Sydney International Food Festival this past weekend…sounds like a great event and I too am dead keen to have a crack at the bacon jam…JB makes a point about the way that non-professional food bloggers were treated in exactly the same way as mainstream food media and I think that he is on to something: would you rather read a review of an eatery by someone who has been paid to write it and whose palate might be somewhat picky, or reviews by normal people? I reckon I lean well towards the normalcy side of the fence. Years ago, around 2000, (yes, again, another missed opportunity to make something of myself!) I thought about posting eating reviews on a website somewhere but couldn’t find a suitable one and this whole blogging thing was then it’s infancy…I think I might kick this off again…Reading into JB’s comments about the quality of non-professional food blogger’s, I wonder if he also might have tapped into an insight for the future? Might it be that soon we will be more reliant on informal blogs (the ones we think best suit our own tastes and preferences) for information that we will be in the professional media. Could this be the start of the Information Militia…?

The Strategist has an item on the UK going back to someplace it is far more comfortable than the current war: back to the days of the Raj on either side of WW1…this has really got me thinking and I need to retire to the hammock to cogitate on it a while before commenting…stay tuned…