Black swan at hotspot
OSINT analyst tracking
Expecting surprise
OSINT analyst tracking
Expecting surprise
Sunday, April 5, 2015
Naval War College Foundation's Global Hotspots Symposium 2015 In San Francisco
I attended the Naval War College Foundation's annual San Francisco seminar last month. This is the third time I've attended and this year's "Global Hotpots Symposium" delivered my money's worth. The photos below depict the day's action at the Marines' Memorial Club. The comments below are paraphrased from the speakers, with my own thoughts in bold text.
The first speaker described the insecurity plaguing the Middle East. Her factual descriptions of conditions in the region were impeccable. The story of ISIS's rise from the remnants of Al-Qaeda and the Al-Nusra Front in Syria is well-documented. The Assad regime's brutal suppression of its own people was a factor the West must acknowledge. ISIS captured billions in wealth from looting Iraqi assets in Mosul and draws fighters from around the world. Disproportionate numbers of wanna-be jihadis are coming from Tunisia, Morocco, and Lebanon.
I disagree with expert assessments of ISIS's tactical and operational prowess. Photos of their "technical" gun trucks with anti-aircraft weapons hastily placed in pickup trucks show an amateurish approach to fire support. The gunners in the truck beds aim wildly without even using iron sights. They exhibit no evidence of combined arms maneuver despite claims of capturing US-made Iraqi armored vehicles and aircraft. I have seen no evidence in open sources of a logistics system ISIS uses to sustain its captured materiel. Terror tactics work against Iraqi forces with no ideological cohesion or nationalist sentiment of their own.
I do agree with our NWCF speaker that ISIS excels at information operations. Erasing the Iraq-Syria border signals Arab rejection of Sykes-Picot colonialism. Executing POWs wearing orange jumpsuits symbolizes revenge for the perceived US humiliation of Muslim prisoners at Gitmo.
Syrian refugees have been straining civil society in Jordan and Lebanon for several years. Sunni Arab states may be turning against ISIS, at least among the Gulf sheikdoms. Turkey and Saudi Arabia could easily be decisive against ISIS if they act. Saudi Arabia just committed more air and ground forces to fight the Houthis in Yemen than they ever committed against ISIS. The kingdom obviously believes Iranian influence to its south is a bigger threat than barbarians to its north. The NWCF speaker astutely observed that the Sunni states tolerated ISIS's expansion as a way to pressure Iran.
Sunni ISIS fighters obviously target Shia. I don't buy the argument that ISIS represents an existential threat to Iran that justifies Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons. Tehran's threat of a nuclear program is more valuable as a strategic deterrent to Saudi Arabia and Turkey. I also don't buy arguments that ISIS cannot be destroyed with military force. They have a strategic-level center of gravity in Raqaa that a ground campaign can destroy. They also have financial channels from oil revenue and donations that the US can interdict.
Our speaker noted that ISIS's logistics system includes smuggling routes across Turkey's southern border. The anti-ISIS coalition's effort to retake Kobane makes decent strategic sense in that context. The coalition's failure to counter ISIS propaganda makes no sense; ISIS's narrative of romance, revenge, honor, and adventure appeals to disaffected youth.
The second NWCF speaker described recent tension between North Korea and South Korea over the Northern Limit Line (NLL). He recapped recent Hermit Kingdom antics as a reminder that the country's "Byungjin line" requires a dual track of economic development and nuclear weapons. The world still cannot confirm whether the DPRK has installed a nuclear warhead on a ballistic missile.
The Korean War Armistice left the two Koreas' western maritime boundary undefined. The North has tested the US and ROK commitments to uphold the NLL several times. North Korea appears to have three aims: maintaining economic rights to fishing and crabbing waters; retaining Haeju's port access to save shipping costs on its maritime route with China; and maintaining the ease of dropping SOF on islands close to the ROK.
North Korea has zero interest in submitting its NLL objections to international mediation. Its KPA Navy is too weak to seize disputed islands outright from the ROK. The Cheonan sinking incident was the North's way of testing how much the US and ROK are willing to escalate after an obvious provocation. I am unclear on whether the NLL represents an airspace boundary as well as a maritime one. I do not know whether the ROK has an identification friend or foe (IFF) system compatible with US aircraft but common sense dictates that they should. South Korea's declared ADIZ clearly extends beyond the NLL, so any North Korean air-sea operation in the NLL's vicinity would demand a military response.
I attended a separate lunch discussion with a senior expert who shared his impressions of the Middle East from several tours. I was not surprised when he said the US underestimated the Sunni/Shia divide in Iraq. I figured that out during my own tour, when it was obvious that Sunnis and Shias would not return to formerly mixed neighborhoods in Baghdad. A similar sectarian fragmentation is not currently evident in Afghanistan. That's the good news, provided the US can keep a token force there long enough to ensure there is no fragmentation. The senior official's best success metrics in both Iraq and Afghanistan were not the number of successful troops in contact (TIC) reports or KIA counts. He valued statistics on local recruitment of military and security forces, along with school enrollment. Those successes proved that tribal leaders in either country accepted their government's legitimacy.
The third NWCF lecturer addressed the future of urban warfare. The most recent Israeli-Hamas war showed how targeting insurgents in cities often destroys infrastructure. The US learned that the hard way in Iraq; just watch the many YouTube videos of JTACs calling for CAS on some building. We also learned that occupying forces end up owning government services, a lesson learned and forgotten in WWII.
Africa is rapidly becoming a laboratory where urban violence tests tribal and sectarian fault lines. Boko Haram's objective is larger than seizing Maiduguri. Their Islamist application of Sharia law appeals to people in corrupt parts of northern Nigeria who have grievances against Nigerian institutions. The larger story of how Chad and Niger carried the fight against Boko Haram must include Nigerian forces' failure to reinforce liberated towns. Al-Shabaab's resurgence is another story the West must hear, because that terror group still has a strong hold on Somalia and is now threatening Western malls after its Kenya mall attack.
Our lecturer endorsed US forces training its division-level formations in full-scale urban warfare. I searched Google for "sewer drone" to find tech options US forces can use in urban warfare. Advice from JAGs on ROE and targeting will be integral to urban warfare. Many of the asymmetric advantages the US brings to a conventional fight are negated when defenders have an advantage in urban terrain.
The final NWCF speaker addressed the possibility of a new Cold War in Russian-American relations. Russia has begun targeting military exercises at NATO areas. NATO's response has been to preposition equipment in Eastern Europe and step up Baltic air patrols. Remember, folks, "NATO" has always been the US instrument for influencing Western Europe. Our European friends rarely take action to assert their interests without US leadership. Russian opinion polls show a rapid shift against the US, but not so much against Europe until recently.
Russia's national psyche has always been predisposed to insecurity and paranoia. I recently attended a gathering of Russian emigres in San Francisco. A lot of them truly believed that pedestrian traffic islands around town were some kind of conspiracy to launder money. It would have been funny if this wasn't indicative of multigenerational Russian paranoia about any official pronouncements.
The apotheosis of the "vatnik/vatnost" phenomenon represents how far Russia has regressed from its post-Cold War openness. Search Google for those words to see an Internet meme celebrating the revival of reactionary, anti-intellectual traditions that Western materialism cannot vanquish. I won't link to the vatnost's retrograde image here, so go find it. The West recognizes Russia's new belligerency and so do former members of the Warsaw Pact who resented Russian dominance.
The West must understand why free market shock therapy worked in the Baltics and Poland but not Russia, Ukraine, or Belarus. I suspect the answer lies partly in the US's willingness to extend military cooperation to those successful states but prematurely curtailed Russia's NATO participation. A strong security link to the West would have made Russian-speaking elites feel safer about sticking with free market reforms. I may explore this theory in future blog articles if no one in the US foreign policy community picks it up.
Karen Dawisha's Putin's Kleptocracy explores how Putin expropriated KGB funds. His recent admission that Russian forces invaded Crimea and provoked its secession prove his duplicity. John Schindler's XX Committee discusses the Chekhism of the Siloviki around Putin, providing invaluable insights into Russia's ruling elite. US reluctance to challenge Putin emboldens him despite Russia's obviously diminishing power. The NWCF expert believes Russia's geostrategic pivot is to its east given China's demand for Russian natural resources. He also believes this will lead to a divorce when they can no longer hide their rivalries. I think that divorce will come sooner than anyone expects when China's economy crashes. I also noticed that many of my Russian-speaking friends in the San Francisco area often repeated Russian media narratives about Ukraine's supposed aggression and "Nazi Galitchina" nationalism. Russia definitely won the propaganda war with Russian language media in Ukraine and elsewhere.
All of the NWCF panelists combined for a final panel and took audience questions. Here come the panel's answers, in a stream of consciousness style with no unifying theme. More Middle East nations are at risk of collapse due to poor governance. The West cannot wear down Russia with spending programs like the Strategic Defense Initiative because the US's ballistic missile defense plan just pumps up Russian nationalism. It's hard to assess the US response to North Korea's cyber actions. The ROK's heavy Internet connectivity is very vulnerable to cyber attack. It is very interesting that piracy is more prevalent on Africa's west cost than its east coast (i.e., Somalia and the Horn of Africa). The US still has substantial interests in anti-piracy, stability, and development in the Horn of Africa. The US Navy's Maritime Strategy mentions A2AD as a stalking horse for countering China, with less attention to civil affairs after budget cuts. China sees global hotspots differently than the US, with separatists in Xinjiang and Tibet figuring prominently. The US can slow but not stop Iran's march to acquiring nuclear weapons because Iran plays with the Non-Proliferation Treaty's limits. It will be easy for Iran to get weapons-grade HEU if it can keep enrichment ability. Saudi Arabia and Egypt are likely to follow Iran into a nuclear arms race. Boko Haram's captive schoolgirls have either perished, dispersed, or returned home; many are still held captive. Arabs think the US State Department's information operations campaign against ISIS lacks credibility. ISIS has a heavy Twitter presence with thousands of sympathetic accounts. The human capacity to handle deprivation has postponed resource wars and ingenuity drives more efficient resource use. Russia's economy and demography won't support Putin's planned army expansion. The Obama Administration truly believes its electoral mandate is to avoid foreign relations.
This concludes my synopsis of the Naval War College's 2015 expedition to The City. A lot of black swans lurk in the world. Look at China's tensions with India, a delayed economic crisis over Greece's inevitable exit from the euro, and migrations from Central America to North America that challenge our southern border's security. US war colleges and private think tanks do a pretty good job of training American leaders to solve strategic problems. I will extend my own discussion of strategy here on Third Eye OSINT.
Full disclosure: The opinions I express in this article reflect my own views and do not reflect the official positions of any US Government entity.
The first speaker described the insecurity plaguing the Middle East. Her factual descriptions of conditions in the region were impeccable. The story of ISIS's rise from the remnants of Al-Qaeda and the Al-Nusra Front in Syria is well-documented. The Assad regime's brutal suppression of its own people was a factor the West must acknowledge. ISIS captured billions in wealth from looting Iraqi assets in Mosul and draws fighters from around the world. Disproportionate numbers of wanna-be jihadis are coming from Tunisia, Morocco, and Lebanon.
I disagree with expert assessments of ISIS's tactical and operational prowess. Photos of their "technical" gun trucks with anti-aircraft weapons hastily placed in pickup trucks show an amateurish approach to fire support. The gunners in the truck beds aim wildly without even using iron sights. They exhibit no evidence of combined arms maneuver despite claims of capturing US-made Iraqi armored vehicles and aircraft. I have seen no evidence in open sources of a logistics system ISIS uses to sustain its captured materiel. Terror tactics work against Iraqi forces with no ideological cohesion or nationalist sentiment of their own.
I do agree with our NWCF speaker that ISIS excels at information operations. Erasing the Iraq-Syria border signals Arab rejection of Sykes-Picot colonialism. Executing POWs wearing orange jumpsuits symbolizes revenge for the perceived US humiliation of Muslim prisoners at Gitmo.
Syrian refugees have been straining civil society in Jordan and Lebanon for several years. Sunni Arab states may be turning against ISIS, at least among the Gulf sheikdoms. Turkey and Saudi Arabia could easily be decisive against ISIS if they act. Saudi Arabia just committed more air and ground forces to fight the Houthis in Yemen than they ever committed against ISIS. The kingdom obviously believes Iranian influence to its south is a bigger threat than barbarians to its north. The NWCF speaker astutely observed that the Sunni states tolerated ISIS's expansion as a way to pressure Iran.
Sunni ISIS fighters obviously target Shia. I don't buy the argument that ISIS represents an existential threat to Iran that justifies Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons. Tehran's threat of a nuclear program is more valuable as a strategic deterrent to Saudi Arabia and Turkey. I also don't buy arguments that ISIS cannot be destroyed with military force. They have a strategic-level center of gravity in Raqaa that a ground campaign can destroy. They also have financial channels from oil revenue and donations that the US can interdict.
Our speaker noted that ISIS's logistics system includes smuggling routes across Turkey's southern border. The anti-ISIS coalition's effort to retake Kobane makes decent strategic sense in that context. The coalition's failure to counter ISIS propaganda makes no sense; ISIS's narrative of romance, revenge, honor, and adventure appeals to disaffected youth.
The second NWCF speaker described recent tension between North Korea and South Korea over the Northern Limit Line (NLL). He recapped recent Hermit Kingdom antics as a reminder that the country's "Byungjin line" requires a dual track of economic development and nuclear weapons. The world still cannot confirm whether the DPRK has installed a nuclear warhead on a ballistic missile.
The Korean War Armistice left the two Koreas' western maritime boundary undefined. The North has tested the US and ROK commitments to uphold the NLL several times. North Korea appears to have three aims: maintaining economic rights to fishing and crabbing waters; retaining Haeju's port access to save shipping costs on its maritime route with China; and maintaining the ease of dropping SOF on islands close to the ROK.
North Korea has zero interest in submitting its NLL objections to international mediation. Its KPA Navy is too weak to seize disputed islands outright from the ROK. The Cheonan sinking incident was the North's way of testing how much the US and ROK are willing to escalate after an obvious provocation. I am unclear on whether the NLL represents an airspace boundary as well as a maritime one. I do not know whether the ROK has an identification friend or foe (IFF) system compatible with US aircraft but common sense dictates that they should. South Korea's declared ADIZ clearly extends beyond the NLL, so any North Korean air-sea operation in the NLL's vicinity would demand a military response.
I attended a separate lunch discussion with a senior expert who shared his impressions of the Middle East from several tours. I was not surprised when he said the US underestimated the Sunni/Shia divide in Iraq. I figured that out during my own tour, when it was obvious that Sunnis and Shias would not return to formerly mixed neighborhoods in Baghdad. A similar sectarian fragmentation is not currently evident in Afghanistan. That's the good news, provided the US can keep a token force there long enough to ensure there is no fragmentation. The senior official's best success metrics in both Iraq and Afghanistan were not the number of successful troops in contact (TIC) reports or KIA counts. He valued statistics on local recruitment of military and security forces, along with school enrollment. Those successes proved that tribal leaders in either country accepted their government's legitimacy.
The third NWCF lecturer addressed the future of urban warfare. The most recent Israeli-Hamas war showed how targeting insurgents in cities often destroys infrastructure. The US learned that the hard way in Iraq; just watch the many YouTube videos of JTACs calling for CAS on some building. We also learned that occupying forces end up owning government services, a lesson learned and forgotten in WWII.
Africa is rapidly becoming a laboratory where urban violence tests tribal and sectarian fault lines. Boko Haram's objective is larger than seizing Maiduguri. Their Islamist application of Sharia law appeals to people in corrupt parts of northern Nigeria who have grievances against Nigerian institutions. The larger story of how Chad and Niger carried the fight against Boko Haram must include Nigerian forces' failure to reinforce liberated towns. Al-Shabaab's resurgence is another story the West must hear, because that terror group still has a strong hold on Somalia and is now threatening Western malls after its Kenya mall attack.
Our lecturer endorsed US forces training its division-level formations in full-scale urban warfare. I searched Google for "sewer drone" to find tech options US forces can use in urban warfare. Advice from JAGs on ROE and targeting will be integral to urban warfare. Many of the asymmetric advantages the US brings to a conventional fight are negated when defenders have an advantage in urban terrain.
The final NWCF speaker addressed the possibility of a new Cold War in Russian-American relations. Russia has begun targeting military exercises at NATO areas. NATO's response has been to preposition equipment in Eastern Europe and step up Baltic air patrols. Remember, folks, "NATO" has always been the US instrument for influencing Western Europe. Our European friends rarely take action to assert their interests without US leadership. Russian opinion polls show a rapid shift against the US, but not so much against Europe until recently.
Russia's national psyche has always been predisposed to insecurity and paranoia. I recently attended a gathering of Russian emigres in San Francisco. A lot of them truly believed that pedestrian traffic islands around town were some kind of conspiracy to launder money. It would have been funny if this wasn't indicative of multigenerational Russian paranoia about any official pronouncements.
The apotheosis of the "vatnik/vatnost" phenomenon represents how far Russia has regressed from its post-Cold War openness. Search Google for those words to see an Internet meme celebrating the revival of reactionary, anti-intellectual traditions that Western materialism cannot vanquish. I won't link to the vatnost's retrograde image here, so go find it. The West recognizes Russia's new belligerency and so do former members of the Warsaw Pact who resented Russian dominance.
The West must understand why free market shock therapy worked in the Baltics and Poland but not Russia, Ukraine, or Belarus. I suspect the answer lies partly in the US's willingness to extend military cooperation to those successful states but prematurely curtailed Russia's NATO participation. A strong security link to the West would have made Russian-speaking elites feel safer about sticking with free market reforms. I may explore this theory in future blog articles if no one in the US foreign policy community picks it up.
Karen Dawisha's Putin's Kleptocracy explores how Putin expropriated KGB funds. His recent admission that Russian forces invaded Crimea and provoked its secession prove his duplicity. John Schindler's XX Committee discusses the Chekhism of the Siloviki around Putin, providing invaluable insights into Russia's ruling elite. US reluctance to challenge Putin emboldens him despite Russia's obviously diminishing power. The NWCF expert believes Russia's geostrategic pivot is to its east given China's demand for Russian natural resources. He also believes this will lead to a divorce when they can no longer hide their rivalries. I think that divorce will come sooner than anyone expects when China's economy crashes. I also noticed that many of my Russian-speaking friends in the San Francisco area often repeated Russian media narratives about Ukraine's supposed aggression and "Nazi Galitchina" nationalism. Russia definitely won the propaganda war with Russian language media in Ukraine and elsewhere.
All of the NWCF panelists combined for a final panel and took audience questions. Here come the panel's answers, in a stream of consciousness style with no unifying theme. More Middle East nations are at risk of collapse due to poor governance. The West cannot wear down Russia with spending programs like the Strategic Defense Initiative because the US's ballistic missile defense plan just pumps up Russian nationalism. It's hard to assess the US response to North Korea's cyber actions. The ROK's heavy Internet connectivity is very vulnerable to cyber attack. It is very interesting that piracy is more prevalent on Africa's west cost than its east coast (i.e., Somalia and the Horn of Africa). The US still has substantial interests in anti-piracy, stability, and development in the Horn of Africa. The US Navy's Maritime Strategy mentions A2AD as a stalking horse for countering China, with less attention to civil affairs after budget cuts. China sees global hotspots differently than the US, with separatists in Xinjiang and Tibet figuring prominently. The US can slow but not stop Iran's march to acquiring nuclear weapons because Iran plays with the Non-Proliferation Treaty's limits. It will be easy for Iran to get weapons-grade HEU if it can keep enrichment ability. Saudi Arabia and Egypt are likely to follow Iran into a nuclear arms race. Boko Haram's captive schoolgirls have either perished, dispersed, or returned home; many are still held captive. Arabs think the US State Department's information operations campaign against ISIS lacks credibility. ISIS has a heavy Twitter presence with thousands of sympathetic accounts. The human capacity to handle deprivation has postponed resource wars and ingenuity drives more efficient resource use. Russia's economy and demography won't support Putin's planned army expansion. The Obama Administration truly believes its electoral mandate is to avoid foreign relations.
This concludes my synopsis of the Naval War College's 2015 expedition to The City. A lot of black swans lurk in the world. Look at China's tensions with India, a delayed economic crisis over Greece's inevitable exit from the euro, and migrations from Central America to North America that challenge our southern border's security. US war colleges and private think tanks do a pretty good job of training American leaders to solve strategic problems. I will extend my own discussion of strategy here on Third Eye OSINT.
Full disclosure: The opinions I express in this article reflect my own views and do not reflect the official positions of any US Government entity.
Friday, April 3, 2015
PMC Living Systems Enter Neofeudal Era
Dr. Sean McFate's The Modern Mercenary describes how private military companies (PMCs) operate today. He is not alone in describing "neomedievalism" as one possible future, although I prefer the term "neofeudalism." One of Dr. McFate's key revelations is that PMCs are more than the mercenaries of old or the military enterprisers who have trained forces since the Thirty Years' War. He believes that modern PMCs have the potential to expand conflicts by creating new demand for their services through extortion, piracy, and other means. I would like to explore likelihood that PMCs can supplant some functions of hollow states.
The UN Mercenary Convention reflects nation-states' desire to maintain a monopoly on violence. Allowing private actors license to proliferate violence erodes nation-state legitimacy. The trouble with such limits is that states now face many challenges to their legitimacy. Sub-national conflicts among ethnic and religious minorities, epidemic diseases, transboundary water management, and other problems can overwhelm a state's management capabilities. Hollow states need help managing disorder as their systems degrade, and PMCs can fulfill a firebreak role that forestalls total state disintegration. Nation-states have the opportunity to update international law for PMCs that recognizes the roles they can play for hollow states.
Growth will come to the PMC sector with or without updated legal controls. Drones and cyber botnets are cheap, and private groups are skilled in their use. Privately owned tech under PMC control means darknet enterprises can fund more overt operations. Hollow states will not be able to detect, regulate, or tax such operations once they gain momentum.
It is easy to view PMCs as living systems much like parasites residing within a host body. The hollow state becomes the host. Smaller PMCs that remain virtual can exist almost exclusively in the cyber-electromagnetic domain. The ones that metastasize into paramilitary forces must have physical real estate to billet their forces and maintain equipment. The imperative to maintain garrisons within safe havens implies PMCs will try to capture hollow states in some way. Hollow states that are starved for funding or cannot maintain the rule of law will become prospective hosts for PMCs that need safe havens.
The leading candidates for PMC safe havens are those countries that rank poorly on scales like Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index or the Fund for Peace's Fragile States Index. They are especially attractive host bodies if they are beset with sub-national conflicts that defy conventional resolution. PMCs will need constant flows of funds to maintain complex weapons and logistics systems as they grow to supplant nation-state conventional forces. These PMCs will naturally seek diverse revenue sources that weak states are willing to surrender in exchange for services. The revenue need not be from illicit sources like smuggling narcotics or contraband goods. The host-PMC relationship could be as benign as contracting for border control and customs enforcement functions that a hollow state can no longer perform. Such a beginning allows an ambitious PMC to manage the sub-national and trans-border relationships that will sustain it independently of a host nation's patronage.
The relationships between growing PMCs and declining states will be as complex as the emergence of feudal manors that supplanted the Western Roman Empire. Roman garrisons abandoned their frontier outposts when the Empire could no longer pay to keep them on duty. The milieu of Catholic bishops, Gothic tribes, and disenfranchised Roman lords were the PMC force providers of their day. Neofeudalism is the future of today's hollow states. Modern PMCs will evolve to fight the global guerrillas that hollow states are too weak to resist.
The UN Mercenary Convention reflects nation-states' desire to maintain a monopoly on violence. Allowing private actors license to proliferate violence erodes nation-state legitimacy. The trouble with such limits is that states now face many challenges to their legitimacy. Sub-national conflicts among ethnic and religious minorities, epidemic diseases, transboundary water management, and other problems can overwhelm a state's management capabilities. Hollow states need help managing disorder as their systems degrade, and PMCs can fulfill a firebreak role that forestalls total state disintegration. Nation-states have the opportunity to update international law for PMCs that recognizes the roles they can play for hollow states.
Growth will come to the PMC sector with or without updated legal controls. Drones and cyber botnets are cheap, and private groups are skilled in their use. Privately owned tech under PMC control means darknet enterprises can fund more overt operations. Hollow states will not be able to detect, regulate, or tax such operations once they gain momentum.
It is easy to view PMCs as living systems much like parasites residing within a host body. The hollow state becomes the host. Smaller PMCs that remain virtual can exist almost exclusively in the cyber-electromagnetic domain. The ones that metastasize into paramilitary forces must have physical real estate to billet their forces and maintain equipment. The imperative to maintain garrisons within safe havens implies PMCs will try to capture hollow states in some way. Hollow states that are starved for funding or cannot maintain the rule of law will become prospective hosts for PMCs that need safe havens.
The leading candidates for PMC safe havens are those countries that rank poorly on scales like Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index or the Fund for Peace's Fragile States Index. They are especially attractive host bodies if they are beset with sub-national conflicts that defy conventional resolution. PMCs will need constant flows of funds to maintain complex weapons and logistics systems as they grow to supplant nation-state conventional forces. These PMCs will naturally seek diverse revenue sources that weak states are willing to surrender in exchange for services. The revenue need not be from illicit sources like smuggling narcotics or contraband goods. The host-PMC relationship could be as benign as contracting for border control and customs enforcement functions that a hollow state can no longer perform. Such a beginning allows an ambitious PMC to manage the sub-national and trans-border relationships that will sustain it independently of a host nation's patronage.
The relationships between growing PMCs and declining states will be as complex as the emergence of feudal manors that supplanted the Western Roman Empire. Roman garrisons abandoned their frontier outposts when the Empire could no longer pay to keep them on duty. The milieu of Catholic bishops, Gothic tribes, and disenfranchised Roman lords were the PMC force providers of their day. Neofeudalism is the future of today's hollow states. Modern PMCs will evolve to fight the global guerrillas that hollow states are too weak to resist.
Thursday, April 2, 2015
The Haiku of OSINT for 04/02/15
The leader's first task
Define strategic problem
Match national goal
Define strategic problem
Match national goal
The Immediate Future for Afghanistan
Afghanistan may finally be getting better after almost fourteen years of direct Western intervention n its affairs. President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani is leveraging his years of development expertise from the World Bank. His Pashtun ties mean he represents Afghanistan's most populous sub-national group. Having a competent head of state is a necessary but not sufficient condition for better governance. The people themselves must want a better country.
UNICEF statistics on Afghanistan are discouraging. School net attendance ratios for girls show only a minority can get education after more than thirteen years of liberation from the Taliban's anti-female theology. Educated women are one of the most potent weapons against radical Islam. The UNGEI's statistics on girls' education in Afghanistan do not match the UNICEF data. The international community will have problems coordinating a coherent aid solution if it can't agree on data for the biggest problem areas.
A developed country must be a connected country. Searching the World Bank's site for Afghanistan's transport sector reveals road network data that has not been updated since 2007. The World Bank's main page on Afghanistan has more recent development data. The overall numbers are still discouraging. It is jarring to see CO2 emissions displayed so prominently for such a poor country. Controlling carbon is a luxury only the developed world can easily afford. Exempting Afghanistan from this expectation for at least a decade would speed its development. The USGS estimates Afghanistan has enormous natural resources but those will remain untapped if the West expects immediate adherence to every environmental standard in the developed world.
Developing countries have every right to join international regimes that will further their development. Afghanistan has been working toward WTO membership since 2004; it is still not a member. The country has been a WIPO member since 2005, so not all is lost. It will be difficult for Afghanistan to exploit any IP or other domestic advantage it can generate as long as it scores low on the Transparency Corruption Perceptions Index and Heritage Foundation Index of Economic Freedom.
Afghanistan's future political development depends greatly on where it resides in the Strauss-Howe generational cycle. Generational Dynamics has begun discussing Afghanistan's Awakening period. Getting better data on the country's age cohorts will be crucial in estimating how strongly younger Afghans will push their elders for political reforms. The Asia Foundation's longitudinal public opinion polls of Afghans are among the best data available covering sentiment within the country. Effective leaders will leverage that polling data. Afghanistan's next generation of leaders should read the Fourth Turning to understand how public opinion will determine their options.
Weak governance in Afghanistan leaves it at the mercy of stronger neighbors. Iran threatened to attack Afghanistan in the late 1990s and has long maintained ties to Herat province. Pashtuns in Pakistan seek to erase the Durand Line and create a Pashtunistan joined with southeastern Afghanistan. Ironically, wise leaders in Kabul can hold Afghanistan together by giving provincial governors the support they need to solve problems as locally as possible. The West has never fully understood Afghanistan's traditionally decentralized approach to governance. Afghans understand it quite well enough.
Repatriated Afghans like President Ghani have enough experience in the West to know how to implement good governance. The West should have enough confidence in their education and professionalism to let them do so in ways consistent with Afghan traditions. The developed world has long known what lasting democracy needs. A middle class that can participate in making policy and an independent judiciary are absolute minimum requirements for a stable society under the rule of law. I have personally met Afghan graduate students studying in San Francisco under Fulbright scholarships and I am confident that they can make the best of what the West offers their country. The Fourth Turning awaits them when they return to Afghanistan.
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