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July 28, 2008
David Kilcullen: the decision to invade Iraq was "f***ing stupid"
Via the Small Wars blog, I learned about an interesting Washington Independent article on how
After nearly seven years of costly strategic ignorance in the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a coming handbook written mostly by a former top aide to Gen. David H. Petraeus seeks to instruct senior civilian policy-makers about the complexities of counterinsurgency.
What stood out, though, is how David Kilcullen (the author of the handbook) assesses the decision to invade Iraq:
Asked for comment, the handbook's chief author, David Kilcullen, a former Australian Army officer who is now an adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, explained that it tells policy-makers to "think very, very carefully before intervening." More bluntly, Kilcullen, who helped Petraeus design his 2007 counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, called the decision to invade Iraq "stupid" -- in fact, he said "f***ing stupid" -- and suggested that if policy-makers apply the manual's lessons, similar wars can be avoided in the future."The biggest stupid idea," Kilcullen said, "was to invade Iraq in the first place."
Kilcullen explained that the handbook will not apply to future operations in Iraq or Afghanistan. "We try not to forge doctrine around an example," he said. Instead, it frames questions about supporting counterinsurgencies in partner or potential-partner countries through the prisms of national interest; graduated levels of commitment, and cost/benefit analysis. It offers numerous warnings about how arduous counterinsurgency is. In a paragraph about the "characteristics" of counterinsurgency, Kilcullen bolds the words "complex," "violent," "difficult," "controversial," "ambiguous," "long-duration" and "high-cost."
This is a significant acknowledgement, and it is important to remember such failures. I would follow Jacqueline Rose's argument in Why War?
“Hang on to failure…if you want to avoid going to war (Rose 1993, 37)
By hanging on to the memory of US-led failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, it may be possible for policymakers to avoid going to war - or at least avoid going to war in the same way - in future. The handbook itself also sounds very interesting:
"Counterinsurgency: A Guide for Policy-Makers" takes the lessons learned by the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan and elevates them to the highest levels of national strategy...The handbook seeks to provide a framework for considering whether Washington should intervene in foreign countries' counterinsurgency operations, raising difficult questions about whether such nations deserve U.S. support; under what conditions that support should occur, and whether success is possible at acceptable cost. No systematic approach to strategic-level questions in counterinsurgency currently exists for senior U.S. government officials.[...]The handbook instructs policy-makers about the necessity of using all elements of national power -- not just military force, but also diplomacy, development aid, the rule of law, academic disciplines and other specialties often considered peripheral to warfighting -- to triumph in counterinsurgency. Victory, as well, is defined as support for a foreign nation's ability to successfully govern, rather than a decisive U.S. military effort.
It sounds like this handbook covers a lot of important ground - I'll look forward to reading it.
Posted by jon_mendel at 12:32 PM | TrackBack
July 24, 2008
Research Paper - A Hard Landing for Virtual War: Iraq, Land and Insurgency
As I've blogged before, I've recently been doing some research for the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation: analysing the role that Iraqi resources have played in the post-invasion disorder in the state, and opportunities to improve the situation there. I'm pleased to say that one of the results of this is now available on the website of the Labour Land Campaign (a group working for economic land reform, with links to the British Labour Party and labour movement). The full PDF is available here.
Posted by jon_mendel at 02:20 PM | TrackBack
July 20, 2008
American Dreams: counterinsurgency and American, Iraqi and Afghan cultures
As part of their American Dreams radio series, the BBC has ran an excellent programme looking at 'cultural' training for US forces in Fort Riley (listen here, while still available). 'Transition Teams' are trained here before heading out to Iraq and Afghanistan, with a focus on 'cultural awareness' over kinetic operations.
Especially interesting about the programme is the way that this training is placed in the context of American culture/s and of certain American ideals. How are conceptions of American Dreams being changed by the long 'war on terror'? And, in trying to understand and engage with other cultures, will conceptions of what it is to be American also change?
Posted by jon_mendel at 02:23 PM | TrackBack
July 14, 2008
Schneier on chinese cyber attacks
There's an interesting post on Bruce Schneier's blog, arguing that
The popular media conception is that there is a coordinated attempt by the Chinese government to hack into U.S. computers -- military, government corporate -- and steal secrets. The truth is a lot more complicated...These hacker groups seem not to be working for the Chinese government. They don't seem to be coordinated by the Chinese military. They're basically young, male, patriotic Chinese citizens, trying to demonstrate that they're just as good as everyone else. As well as the American networks the media likes to talk about, their targets also include pro-Tibet, pro-Taiwan, Falun Gong and pro-Uyghur sites.The hackers are in this for two reasons: fame and glory, and an attempt to make a living..And some of the hackers are good. Over the years, they have become more sophisticated in both tools and techniques. They're stealthy. They do good network reconnaissance. My guess is what the Pentagon thinks is the problem is only a small percentage of the actual problem.[...]
If anything, the fact that these groups aren't being run by the Chinese government makes the problem worse. Without central political coordination, they're likely to take more risks, do more stupid things and generally ignore the political fallout of their actions.
In this regard, they're more like a non-state actor.
One thing to draw out from Scheier's post is the possibility that - because these groups are functioning like non-state actors - their cyber attacks could be made considerably more effective. Loose networks of hackers can afford to try a lot of different things - some of which will be prospectively and/or retrospectively stupid - and give nodes in the network considerable autonomy.
Such networks are robust enough to risk the loss of a number of nodes, and to risk serious failures: by doing this, they are more able to innovate than would otherwise be the case, and can become extremely problematic for state actors.
Posted by jon_mendel at 04:18 PM | TrackBack
July 03, 2008
The End of Theory, and the US Army on "the Cusp of Postpositivism"?
In an interesting Small Wars Journal article, Christopher R. Paparone (associate professor in the Army Command and General Staff College’s Department of Logistics and Resource Operations) looks at the new Army FM 3-0, Operations - and argues that this shows that "the Army-at-war is transitioning from a positivist to a postpositivist philosophy." Paparone's argument is often compelling, but a number of questions remain outstanding. In particular, I would doubt whether the type of postpositivism discussed by Paparone will allow the Army to copy with some of the ways in which conflict is now taking place.
A couple of weeks after Paparone's article went online, Chris Anderson posted The End of Theory on Wired. For Anderson, today's deluge of data means that conventional approaches to the scientific method - I think he would include positivism in this - is now obsolete. However, what is also obsolete is certain postpositivistic approaches to making sense of the world, and researching how we make sense of it:
At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later. For instance, Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn't pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising — it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right...Google's founding philosophy is that we don't know why this page is better than that one: If the statistics of incoming links say it is, that's good enough. No semantic or causal analysis is required.
Anderson's argument is itself problematic: the data deluge he diagnoses (perhaps something akin to the loss of any real behind an excessive hyperreality, as analysed by Baudrillard?) does not seem to me to dictate a prioritising of mathematical analysis, or a complete end to the utility of a (social) scientific method. People can, and do, do effective work in unknown and shifting contexts, and there is also the potential for political and military actors to themselves create the contexts in which they work.
That said, I find Anderson's short piece is compelling in a number of ways. Anderson does make a strong argument against the type of positivism and postpositivism that Paperone finds in FM 3-0. One can argue that many of the current opponents of the US - for example, the networked insurgencies in Iraq - have already moved beyond postpositivism, and are enthusiastically embracing a number of aspects of the petabyte age.
States and state militaries have struggled and are struggling to respond to this. The move to a type of postpositivism discussed by Paperone is interesting, but I suspect that it will not be a sufficient response to such opponents.
