Successful info ops, but who are the targets?

 This looks like good news:

U.S., Allies See Progress in Selling Al-Qaeda As an Enemy to the Muslim World“, Walter Pincus, Washington Post  (28 April 2008) — Excerpt:

“More and more Muslim and Arab populations — [including] clerics and scholars — are questioning the value of al-Qaeda’s program,” Juan Carlos Zarate, deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism, said Wednesday at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Or, it might be bad news:

“Using Info Operations to Defeat AQ“, Marc Lynch, posted at Abu Aardvark (29 April 2008) — Excerpt:

Thanks to Matt Armstrong for tipping me off to the online proceedings of the 2008 Unrestricted Warfare Symposiumat Johns Hopkins, which includes an interesting set of briefing slides by Col. Karen Lloyd of J3, Joint IO Warfare Center.   The interesting part of her presentation was what appears, from the slides, to be some frank discussion of what the US is currently doing in the information operations arena against al-Qaeda, including from Slide 6 …

… Now, compare this to an April 23 speech at the Washington Institute by deputy national security advisor for combatting terrorism Juan Zarate called “Winning the War on Terror,” which offered four examples of the “growing rejection of the al-Qaida program and message”:
 
These examples offered by a senior American official to an American audience in support of the claim that “al-Qaeda is losing” (persuasive enough to merit a story in the Washington Post) mirror, nearly point for point, the examples presented by Col. Lloyd of successful US information operations aimed at defeating al-Qaeda.

“Combating the Growing Threat of International Organized Crime”

Summary:  On rare occasions speeches by public officials deserve attention.  This is one, describing the growing danger of international criminal organizations.  For more on the geopolitical implications of this, see John Robb’s Global Guerillas website, or read his book Brave New War.  Hat tip on this to Simon Hunt Strategic Services.

“Combating the Growing Threat of International Organized Crime“, speech by United States Attorney General Michael Mukasey,  given at Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).  Excerpt:

Perhaps we are victims of our own success because it seems that there is a widespread belief around the country that organized crime is no longer a serious threat. Most Americans think of organized crime only as a part of America’s past, its modern role merely the subject of popular movies or television dramas. I can assure you that organized crime is different in source and different in scope, but unfortunately this phenomenon, in a different institutional costume, is alive and well.

That is why, earlier this year, the Organized Crime Council met for the first time in 15 years. It did so because the United States faces a new and more modern threat, from international organized crime. We can’t ignore criminal syndicates in other countries on the naïve assumption that they are a danger only in their homeland, whether it is located in Eurasia, Africa, or anywhere else.

Roads in Afghanistan, a new weapon to win 4GW’s?

A new article by Dr. David Kilcullen: “Political Maneuver in Counterinsurgency“, posted at the Small Wars Council (24 April 2008) — “Road-Building in Afghanistan, Part 1 of a Series on Political Maneuver in Counterinsurgency”

Over the past eight years Kilcullen has laid a profound theoretical foundation for COIN on which he has written many articles rich with operational insights and recommendations. Here is a full archive of his work: The Essential 4GW reading list: David Kilcullen.

One fascinating aspect of Kilcullen’s work is the relative absence of critical review. Such attention is usually an indicator of significance, and his work is powerful in both an intellectual and operational sense. Why so little analytical attention? Even Newton and Einstein had their critics.

I posted this question (and a link to my archive of Kilcullen’s work) in the comments at both the Small Wars Journal and at Zenpundit. The SWJ Editor(s) deleted both (too disturbing to the troops, perhaps). At the Zenpundit there were two replies. First, from the Zenpundit himself:

The media discover info ops, with outrage!

The media have discovered that our military has mastered the key 4GW skill of running information operations.  Thoroughly researched and well-written, the following is probably one of the most important news stories of the year.   I strongly recommend reading it.

“Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand“, New York Times, 20 April 2008 — “A Pentagon Campaign:  Retired officers have been used to shape terrorism coverage from inside the TV and radio networks. “

This should not be news.  In November 2007 I described good news:  our military had learned how to run successful information operations.  Unfortunately, they were running them against us.  Mine was not the first such article. 

One of the best to date examined the propaganda of the pre-war and early war phases.  Boehlert’s account of Bush’s Imperial press conference on 6 March 2003 is worth the price of his book, recounting the moment in which “please stand for the President of the United States” in effect gave way to to “bow before the President of the United States.”

“Lapdogs“, Eric Boehlert, Salon (4 May 2006) — “Cowardly and clueless, the U.S. media abandoned its post as Bush led the country into a disastrous war. A look inside one of the great journalistic collapses of our time. This is an excerpt from former Salon senior writer Eric Boehlert’s new book Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush.”

Many do not see any problem with this, like this post at Winds of Change.  Almost nobody discusses the real problem with government propaganda:  it undermines people’s trust of and identification with the State.  That is bad even for tyrannies like the USSR; it is a potentially terminal problem for a republic. 

Whatever the short-term benefits of info ops — in this case, building public support for a long war — it undermines the foundation of our political regime.  That should be an unacceptable price in the Decline of the State era, in which strengthening people’s relationship with the government must be a paramount strategic goal.

Update:  A comment about this story by W. Patrick Lang (Colonel, US Army, retired), posted at Sic Semper Tyrannis (19 April 2008):

I was invited to one briefing at the Pentagon. At the meeting, many of those mentioned in this article were present. The purpose of the meeting was to give Rumsfeld the chance to explain the Abu Ghraib mess. I asked some awkward questions and was not invited again.

Update:  A comment by Matt Armstrong at MountainRunner (23 April 2008) that concurs with my conclusion (mentioned above).  The full post is worth reading!  Excerpt:

In the end, I don’t see this as an issue of legality, but one of credibility and trust. The Rumsfeldian Defense Department clearly failed to understand the importance of these two elements in Information Age conflict and counterinsurgency, which has been ably documented elsewhere.

( click for more about how our military has mastered this key 21st century military skill)

Visionaries point the way to success in the age of 4GW

After WWII we entered the age in which 4GW is the primary mode of warfare.  In response first come analysts, followed by visionaries, then solutions (in three kinds).

Analysts (see this chapter) and visionaries provide the foundation on which solutions are build.  Visionaries propose radical ideas for the conduct of warfare (beyond anything we can do today) or even visions of new geopolitical regimes.  They play several essential roles. Their creativity provides new directions to more conventional experts. Their imaginations provide vigor and energy to stimulate others to write about 4GW. Their writings appeal to both the public and decision-makers in a way that few analysts can equal, communicating the nature of modern war to a large audience much as Carl Sagan did for science.

Like Sagan, successful visionaries earn more money than almost anyone else in their field.  This is the “sweet spot” in any profession, offering fame and fortune.

Insights about modern war from the NIC’s 2020 Project

Summary:  the papers from a workshop of the NIC’s 2020 Project provide valuable insights.  This post discusses a paper by Martin van Creveld, and then ends with a speculative question.

As part of their ”2020 Project”, the National Intelligence Council held a workshop on the “Changing Nature of Warfare” on 25 May 2004.  Key topics and questions focused on surveying the prospects for conflict around the world between today and 2020.

1. What are the contemporary characteristics of war that are likely to persist into the future?
2. How can we tell, are there signposts?
3. What are the characteristics of contemporary conflict that are likely to be consigned to the dustbin of history by 2020?
4. What are the emerging characteristics of war?

Many of the papers are relevant today and worth reading.  One in particular seems prophetic four years later:  Martin van Creveld’s “Modern Conventional Warfare: An Overview“.  As usual for his work, it was packed with insights. 

4GW: A solution of the first kind - Robots!

Just as visionaries earn more than analysts, so do solutions of the first kind (hardware) receive more funding than solutions of the second (ideas) or the third kind (ways to attract, retain, and train people).  This is life in modern America.  This is why we continue to lose at 4GW.

The big money is in building things.  Sometimes they work, like the F-16.  Sometimes they do not, like the nuclear aircraft engine.  Sometimes they work but are too expensive to produce, like the XM2001 Crusader.  Sometimes they are too expensive to produce, but we do so anyway — like the F-22.  Now it appears that robots are the future of defense procurement, as seen in these articles.

4GW: A solution of the third kind

Solutions of the first kind… new things (i.e., robots, autonomous flying vehicles,
software to help us understand and manipulate foreign societies).

Solutions of the second kind… new ideas about tactics and strategy.

Solutions of the third kind… new ways to shape our institutions
– aka politics — usually by altering how they recruit, train, and promote people. 

Don Vandergriff (Major, US Army, retired) is one of the very few actually implementing 4GW solutions of the third kind, with his work for the Army on new methods of training leaders.  He now has a blog here, writing as an expert on leader development, personnel management and fourth generation warfare.

I strongly recommend visiting his blog for a look at the cutting edge of 4GW (at least, work on our side about 4GW).  For links to his online articles and list of his books, see The Essential 4GW reading list: Chapter Two, Donald Vandergriff.

Please share your comments by posting below (brief and relevant, please) — especially with suggestions about links worth adding — or email me at fabmaximus at hotmail dot com (note the spam-protected spelling).

Previous posts in this series

1. Arrows in the Eagle’s claw — solutions to 4GW, chapter I
2. Arrows in the Eagle’s claw — Chapter II, about 4GW analysts
3. A solution to 4GW — the introduction
4. How to get the study of 4GW in gear
5. 4GW: A solution of the second kind – Shawn Brimley has provided an example of a solution of the second kind with “A Grand Strategy of Sustainment”.  It is good, but solutions of the second kind do us little good.
6. 4GW: A solution of the third kind – Don Vandergriff is one of the very few today implementing solutions of the third kind.

Dark origins of the new COIN manual, FM 3-24

Summary:  A follow-up to this post about the use of social science language and concepts in FM 3-24.  They provide useful terminology, but at the cost of either weakening the beliefs of our troops or giving them a “grey net of abstraction to cover the world in order to simplify and explain it in a way that is pleasing to us.”  The former would be disastrous in 4GW, the latter probably useless exercise.  Or worse than useless, creating the illusion of understanding foreign cultures which eliminates the bafflement that leads to study, thought, and partial understanding.  While it is easy to dismiss these fears, the social sciences themselves note the powerful effect of language on thought and behavior.

One of the interesting aspects of the new COIN manual, FM 3-24, is its use of technical sociological terminology ripped from the intellectual framework of its creators (e.g. Max Weber) — a framework both dark and alien to American culture.  In it “We hold these truths to be self-evident” reflects the naive thinking of a lost age, and can be believed only by “a few big babies in university chairs or in editorial offices”  (from  Weber’s “Science as a Vocation“).  In it our core beliefs  — liberty, freedom of religion, equality of races and genders, democracy and free enterprise — are just choices, like those of any other culture.  As such we have no basis on which to advocate any of practices to other cultures (other than Mao’s adage that “power grows out of the barrel of a gun”).

To illustrate this, here are some excepts from Allan Bloom’s great work Closing of the American Mind in which he describes the origins of these concepts.

On the dark roots of this framework

It is amazing to me that the irrational source of all conscious life in Freud, and the relativity of all values in Weber, did not pose a problem for them and their optimism about science.  … {Weber’s} science was formulated as a doubtful dare against the chaos of things, and values certainly lay beyond its limits.  That is what the very precarious, not to say imaginary, distinction between facts and values meant.

4GW: A solution of the second kind

Solutions of the first kind:  new things (i.e., robots, autonomous flying vehicles,
software to help us understand and manipulate foreign societies).

Solutions of the second kind:  new ideas about tactics and strategy.

Solutions of the third kind:  new ways to shape our institutions (aka politics),
usually by altering how they recruit, train, and promote people.

Shawn Brimley has provided an example of a solution of the second kind with “A Grand Strategy of Sustainment“, posted at the Small Wars Journal (20 March 2008). I agree with almost everything he says, which seems to be in the broad current of work about grand strategy in the era of post-trinitiarian conflicts — in which 4GW has become the dominant mode of war. William Lind, Chet Richards, me, and many others have said similar things.

Most of these works focus on description of a desired new tactic and strategy, with little analysis of why we in fact do things differently or how can our institutions effect these new ideas. Such analysis usually features ample use of “American should do” this and that. A key factor in solutions of the second kind is why we have our current policies, and that answer suggests the cure used by each author.

A key to the power of FM 3-24, the new COIN manual

(later additions to the text are in red)   FM 3-24 provides a basis for DoD’s people to describe a society. This is sketched out under “Describe the Effects of the Operational Environment” (3-16 through 3-65+) using standard social science definitions. This is valuable, as we cannot describe that for which we lack the words, and clear language promotes clear thinking.  Ths post discusses the problematic nature of the Army using language and concepts from the social sciences, following yesterday’s post discussing the limited operational utility of social science theories.

General Semantics teaches us that language is a process of abstraction, and can sometimes give just the illusion of knowledge. The map is not the territory. The name is not the thing itself. The deeper we go in this section of FM 3-24, the deeper gets the waters. To take a small example: as Americans we can talk about clans, races, and other groups … but understanding their hold on people’s minds and feelings is far more difficult. As we climb the ladder to more abstract concepts, their meaning becomes more difficult to grasp.

3-44. A value is an enduring belief that a specific mode of conduct or end state of existence is preferable to an opposite or converse mode of conduct or end state of existence.

Values are the bedrock on which many people build their lives. Americans are taught in most colleges that facts and values are different things, a concept with roots in western philosophy going back to Hume. Believing that values are not facts puts one in a different cultural universe from that of many other peoples, who believe that their values are not personally chosen but instead rooted in reality … derived from God. The Army can teach the words, but the music is more difficult to learn.

An implied message of western social sciences can be that “we” are superior to “them”. After all, Max Weber taught “us” that values are just beliefs, while “they” do not know this — foolishly regarding their values as permanent and enduring facts about the universe. Armed with these insights, it must be difficult not to patronize the locals (especially in the ancient societies of the Middle East, which had a high civilization when the people of Britain painted themselves blue and worshiped trees). Even worse, these insights might encourage officers to believe they actually understand these foreign societies (much of the language in FM 3-24 encourages this). Worst of all would be belief that the Anthropology 101 concepts allow us to successfully manipulate foreign societies (see yesterday’s post for more about this last point. Much of the professional training in these fields is to overcome these tendencies.

As an example, consider one simple and clear typology from FM 3-24 (from the work of Max Weber):

The 2 most devastating 4GW attacks on America, and the roots of FM 3-24

Summary:  building COIN strategies upon our ability to successfully change foreign societies (from infornmation operations up to governmental reform) is like basing our monetary policy on our ability to change straw into gold. 

The United States has suffered several devastating 4GW attacks since WWII, perhaps the two worst being…

•  Ignoring the recommendation of the Moynihan Report (”The Negro Family: The Case For National Action“, US Department of Labor, March 1965).  Instead of providing government support to black Americans in a way that supported their families, Federal support was exquisitely designed to undermine their family and community structures.  The result is a large almost dysfunctional underclass, with areas like Harlem in worse shape than they were in 1964.  (see Obama’s comment, below)
• The credibility of the US government in the eyes of its people has been shattered, so that its statements are widely considered lies.  “Never believe anything the government says until the second denial.”  Economic statistics are considered manipulated by many on Wall Street.  Many African-Americans believe that the US government distributed crack and started the AIDS epidemic. 

That is, these would have been devastating 4GW attacks on America, of the fashionable “cultural warfare” and info-ops variants — except that we were the agents.  These are major failures in our government’s social engineering.  We have to do better; our apparent inability to do so is a major factor in the decline of the state.  But that is not the point of this post.

If basic social engineering is often beyond our capabilities at home — where our knowledge and tools are considerable — what about our ability to do this in foreign lands, the keystone to modern COIN theory?  For example, before doing info-ops or seeking to alter a society, what must one know about that society?

Excerpt from FM 3-24 (the new COIN manual): 

How to get the study of 4GW in gear

Here is an question by Jason lifted from the comments on A solution to 4GW — the introduction.

Fabius, if you reference “Masters of War” by Michael Handel (which I am reading), the author makes the point that even 4GW is Trinitarian since you still have the three components - the state, the populace, and the non-state actor. Even if the non-state actor is embedded within the populace, there is a distinction between the general populace, which must be agitated to support the state against the non-state actor.

This is interesting on several levels.  It offers a legitimate question, keying off the work of an expert in military history (Handel being one of the top scholars in his generation of Clausewitz’s works; he died in 2001 — correction per Jason in the comments ).  It also offers insight as to why the study of 4th generation warfare has progressed so little in the past five or ten years.  The question having been debated at length in many forums, I will slight it in favor of the second issue — which seems of immediate and practical significance.

A solution to 4GW - the introduction

 We now have an adequate basis upon which to develop a solution for 4GW (at least, a “Mark I” version).  Three recent books provide the last missing pieces of this puzzle:

• If We Can Keep It by Chet Richards  (aka IWCKI)
• Brave New War by John Robb  (BNW)
• The Changing Face of War by Martin van Creveld

None of these are long (IWCKI is only 152 pages) or inaccessible to the general reader, as they are clearly conceived and well-written.  These works build on the foundation of many other books and articles since the study of 4GW began (using an arbitrarily point) with publication of Into the Fourth Generation by William Lind et al (1989), and Martin van Creveld’s Transformation of War (1991) and The Rise and Decline of the State (1999).

We must define the problem before attempting to describe a solution.  Thomas Kuhn described a paradigm as shared body of knowledge, definitions, and assumptions, allowing communication among workers in a specific field, and focusing their research on agreed-upon key questions.  Modern war lacks a consensus on these things; hence the debate frequently devolves into cacophony.  Even the “community” talking about 4GW lacks a tight paradigm, and the discussion seems to be fragmenting with the multiplication of war’s generations (5th gen, 6th gen) and criticisms — often quite valid – of 4GW as (in my words) a hall of mirrors.   (See this post on DNI for more on the definition of 4GW)

This might result from the conceptual basis of 4GW having been ripped from the context established in van Creveld’s writings, without regard for the distinction he draws between the broad class of non-Trin conflicts and war (the latter being a subset of the former).  Can we build a more-or-less agreed upon framework to facilitate discussion?  (Paradigms are conceptual tools, not miniature versions of reality)

Theories about 4GW are not yet like the Laws of Thermodynamics

One of the baleful influences on the 4GW analysis is the science of Psychohistory developed by Hari Seldon, capable of accurately predicting history (as described in the Foundation novels of Isaac Asimov).  Social science “laws” in the real world are just heuristics, generalities not to be confused with the Laws of Thermodynamics.  This is especially true in military theory.  For example, Clausewitz’s On War opens with some general rules (e.g., the relationship between offense and defense), which he then elaborates with great detail but no certainty (having experience at war, he knew the limits of theories about people).

This is important, as progress in understanding 4GW requires distilling out more of these general relationships from the mass of 20th century history.  For example, in January 2007 I postulated that insurgencies come in two flavors, depending on the role of foreigners.  Chet Richards refined this differentialtion of insurgency types into …

• Classical insurgency: a revolution, in other words, in which a sizable fraction of the population opposes what they consider to be an illegitimate or oppressive government, as the American colonies did in 1776-1781. The goal of the insurgent groups may be either to take control of the central government or to achieve independence for a portion of the population.
• War of national liberation: in which a sizable fraction of the people in a country throws out an occupying foreign power, as Vietnam did to us in 1965-1975.

From the Introduction to If We Can Keep It (IWCKI)