Al-Qaeda makes more sense when viewed as a venture capital firm specializing in the business of terror.  By no means am I the first person to draw this analogy, but considering this article in the L.A. Times, the parallel seems increasingly fitting.  Greg Miller writes,

Al Qaeda and its affiliates have adapted their tactics to emphasize speed and probability of success over spectacle, U.S. intelligence officials believe, a shift in strategy that poses problems for spy agencies that were reorganized in recent years to stop large-scale attacks like those of Sept. 11, 2001.

The new emphasis is seen as a significant departure for a terrorist network that had focused on sophisticated plots involving synchronized strikes on multiple targets, and teams of operatives coordinating across international borders.

An examination of recent plots, including the bombing attempt on a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day, has convinced U.S. counter-terrorism analysts that Al Qaeda is becoming more opportunistic, using fewer operatives and dramatically shrinking the amount of planning and preparation that goes into an attack.

It’s likely that this change in tactics has been born out of of necessity as the group has found it increasingly difficult to coordinate massive, orchestrated strikes in the post-9/11 era.  However, by shifting to a faster, less-coordinated (decentralized) approach Al-Qaeda makes it harder for authorities to discover and prevent attacks.

It’s test fast, fail fast.

Less coordination means fewer connections to Al-Qaeda core, less financial costs, less time and a higher degree of uncertainty and chaos (throwing smoke and fog in our OODA loop).  These are characteristics more akin to open-source warfare as laid out by by John Robb in “Brave New War.”

Of course the downside for Al-Qaeda is they end up with half-trained clowns like the Christmas Day bomber who don’t always carry out their attacks successfully.

But here’s the kicker…success or failure may no longer depend on whether or not the bomb goes off. Miller explains,

But if Al Qaeda had misgivings about downscaled ambitions, U.S. officials said, it probably was emboldened by the reaction in the United States to the Christmas Day plot, even though it failed.

The lesson Al Qaeda probably took was that, ” ‘Jeez, the damn bomb didn’t go off and the Americans are still going out of their minds,’ ” a senior U.S. counter-terrorism official said, describing the political fallout for President Obama, as well as finger-pointing among U.S. intelligence agencies.

It’s too early to say definitively if Al-Qaeda is truly shifting the way it does business, but the more we learn about homegrown terrorists hoping to get their “projects” funded by or at least connected in some way to Al-Qaeda VC the more it opens the door for lots of smaller attacks or swarming rather than one big one.  John Robb may be onto something.

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Even people who know nil about counterinsurgency are quick to speak of the illusive quest to “win the hearts and minds.” It has a beautiful simplicity to it…just show the locals how great we are and they’ll turn their backs on the enemy, game over. As usual though, reality has to spoil the party with its complexities and all.

It’s not that “winning the hearts and minds” of the locals is a poor goal, but we must manage our expectations of what it’s actually going to look like.

Warm embraces of gratitude with Afghan elders around a campfire of burning poppy plants with Lee Greenwood’s faint voice somewhere in the background is probably just not in the cards. We are foreign invaders no matter how you sugar-coat it.

If we’re to operate effectively on the moral level of war (arguably the most important in 4GW) we must have a realistic view of how we are seen by others. We may think our good intentions are quite obvious how dare anyone question them, but the Pashtun father who sees his toddler vaporized by an errant drone-fired missile probably has a decent rationale for challenging this notion.

Mr. Aaron J. Henninger is a lecturer on the topics of Public Affairs and Strategic Communication at the United States Air Force’s Air War College. He wrote the following mind grenade in the fantastic op-ed below. The full article can be found here.

Certain organizations have either a stigma or a perception that precludes them from carrying out specific tasks or actions. I charge that a fielded military force cannot successfully or with any degree of longevity, carry out military occupation and enact a successful public relations campaign. The messages go beyond being mixed and the long-term visuals are far too compelling than any press release or photo-op.

What if 9/11 conspirators were to have walked through NY during and after the attacks to attempt community relations? As horrific and absurd as this might sound, that is how we are perceived in some corners of the world, in the aftermath of airstrikes and destruction, attempting to persuade or engender good will.

Our efforts lack any and all sensitivity to the historical underpinnings of the West’s relationship with the Middle East. One photo-op cannot undo a thousand years grievance or mistrust. As a government we must understand and accept this reality.

What we would term as “good images”, are often times generated more for self-flagellation of the US population at large than the indigenous, effected population.

Messages of, ‘We are your friend, we are here to help you’ set against a backdrop of Humvees and .50 cal machine guns is disingenuous at best.

Check out more of Mr. Henninger’s outstanding work at his blog, on the DEFENSE.

For another post-9/11 mind grenade, see an earlier post on David Foster Wallace here.

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From Foreign Policy’s Reality Check,

Last month, an official told the Daily Telegraph that their country “has the greatest concentration of active al Qaeda supporters [in the West],” posing a threat to Britain and “the rest of the world.” The same article cited a fresh and ominous finding from the director of MI5. He estimated his service was aware of some 2,000 “radicalized Muslims” who might be involved in terrorist plots. That figure, of course, doesn’t include the population of plotters who have escaped MI5 scrutiny, like Abdulmutallab. As if to underline the threat, on Jan. 12, the British government banned two of the country’s most notorious Islamist organizations, Islam4UK and Al Muhajiroun, under a 2000 anti-terrorism law.

This goes back to my previous argument on why “preventing Al-Qaeda safe havens in Afghanistan” is a myopic strategy considering the nature of the opponent.  Al-Qaeda is a GLOBAL terrorist organization with members scattered all over the world. I question the notion that keeping them out of one country or two (Yemen) will significantly hamper their operations.

We rarely hear our leaders discussing ways to bolster our relations with Muslims living in Western nations, yet this may be a far greater use of our time and money if we consider the above statements.  I suspect the reason it doesn’t get as much chatter on the airwaves is because it goes against the existing paradigms we have concerning warfare.  Simply put, few people in the American National Security apparatus feel confident operating in this “soft power” territory.

In “The Accidental Guerrilla” David Kilcullen asks the questions that come when reevaluating about these paradigms,

How, for example, do we wage war on nonstate actors who hide in states with which we are at peace, even within our own society?  How do we work with allies whose territory provides safe haven for non-state opponents?  How do we defeat enemies who exploit the tools of globalization and open societies, without destroying the very things we seek to protect?

Christian Caryl of the Foreign Policy article shows the real-life issues that arise as we attempt to answer these questions,

In the 1990s, policymakers desperate to address the concerns of the nation’s Muslims decided to foster the creation of Islamic umbrella groups. They also unwittingly fostered radical ones. For instance, Abdulmutallab invited extremists to speak to his college student group — but doesn’t seem to have done anything in London in contravention of British law. And he is not the only vivid illustration of how the institutions of democracy can dangerously blend with the institutions of jihadism.

Forays into the fight against radicalization in Western countries is a muddy affair at best, but its something that we’d better start figuring out soon. After all, I doubt the people of London would take to kindly to a strategy that involved firing missiles on their city from unmanned drones.

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Retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich, a West Point Graduate who went on to earn a PhD from Princeton and later taught as a professor at West Point and Johns Hopkins before joining the faculty at Boston University, is the author of one of the best books I’ve read in several years, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. A conservative historian, Bacevich expresses his “dismay at the direction of the U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War.” Mainly, the excessive use of military force as an instrument to remake the world in the way we see fit.

The interview is a bit dated (Aug 2008) so forgive the election year discussions…and the obnoxious commercial break in the middle of the interview, but the main thrust of his message remains important, maybe even more so on the eve of 30,000 additional troops making their way to Afghanistan, the “Graveyard of Empires.”

I welcome your comments on what may prove to be some more controversial talking points.  Enjoy the interview and sound off below!

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“Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.” – Benjamin Franklin

The late author David Foster Wallace, well-known for works such as Infinite Jest and Consider the Lobster, is someone whom I have always heard spoken of in high regard, but have yet to read myself. In a 2007 issue of “The Atlantic,” he posed a question that I believe is even more relevant today than it was at the time of writing. The premise being, how much freedom are we willing to give up for the sake of security?

**Much thanks to Gordon Brander for posting a link to this via Twitter and alerting me to such a gem.**

Since 9/11 the United States has gone to gargantuan lengths to make America “safe again” – forming an entire new department (Homeland Security) with the sole purpose of protecting us from those who wish to do us and our country harm, expending nearly a trillion dollars and thousands of lives prosecuting 9 years of war on foreign soil, transforming a trip through the airport from a leisurely, even fun little jaunt into an infuriating backwash of security checks and buffoonery, forming a color code for how threatened you should feel on any given day, building fences, tightening border security, creating watch lists, monitoring phone conversations/websites/e-mail traffic, assassinating enemies by missiles shot from unmanned machines reigning down death from the skies…I’ll stop for the sake of time and sanity.

Turning our attention to the latest terrorist plot involving the young Nigerian Jihadist who set his crotch on fire (72 disappointed virgins) 30,000 feet above American soil as his Northwest Airlines flight made its way to Detroit, the renewed focus on increased security seems much like “the song that never ends.” Acting as a prophet, Wallace exposed some questions for discussion two years ago that bear repeating on this day as we decide how much more we are willing to give up in the name of security — take a look:

Are some things still worth dying for? Is the American idea* one such thing? Are you up for a thought experiment? What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the atrocities of 9/11 not as victims but as democratic martyrs, “sacrifices on the altar of freedom”?* In other words, what if we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability to terrorism is part of the price of the American idea? And, thus, that ours is a generation of Americans called to make great sacrifices in order to preserve our democratic way of life—sacrifices not just of our soldiers and money but of our personal safety and comfort?

In still other words, what if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite all reasonable precautions, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of ghastly terrorist attack that a democratic republic cannot 100-percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting?

Is this thought experiment monstrous? Would it be monstrous to refer to the 40,000-plus domestic highway deaths we accept each year because the mobility and autonomy of the car are evidently worth that high price? Is monstrousness why no serious public figure now will speak of the delusory trade-off of liberty for safety that Ben Franklin warned about more than 200 years ago? What exactly has changed between Franklin’s time and ours? Why now can we not have a serious national conversation about sacrifice, the inevitability of sacrifice—either of (a) some portion of safety or (b) some portion of the rights and protections that make the American idea so incalculably precious?

Here it is put another way by counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen, author of The Accidental Guerrilla,

“The threat is that a zero-risk approach to terrorism, one that seeks to drive the chances of another 9/11 attack down to zero, might cause Western countries to take well-intentioned precautionary measures that would be so divisive internationally, and so repressive domestically, that we would end up destroying our way of life in order to save it, compromising freedoms and values to guard against a relatively remote risk.”

The problem with most of that national security apparatus is that it is full of technicians, but few philosophers. Everyone is figuring out how to fine-tune and employ the latest gadgets designed to scan, probe, listen, kill and protect, but no one is stepping back from the problem and asking whether we should spend as much time, blood and treasure doing the aforementioned in the first place. The very thought of such a question would be banished as unpatriotic by most. And yet, Wallace concludes,

In the absence of such a conversation, can we trust our elected leaders to value and protect the American idea as they act to secure the homeland? What are the effects on the American idea of Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Patriot Acts I and II, warrantless surveillance, Executive Order 13233, corporate contractors performing military functions, the Military Commissions Act, NSPD 51, etc., etc.? Assume for a moment that some of these measures really have helped make our persons and property safer—are they worth it? Where and when was the public debate on whether they’re worth it? Was there no such debate because we’re not capable of having or demanding one? Why not? Have we actually become so selfish and scared that we don’t even want to consider whether some things trump safety? What kind of future does that augur?

I don’t pretend to know the answers to these questions, but I do know that security has its costs and the discussion of whether or not they are always and forevermore worth bearing needs to take place. Thus far, it has not.

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Management brainiac Tom Peters gives us his bare bones guide to success:

“So here are ‘the real basics’—in five words. Achieve Excellence at these five things and the world (of human organizations) will pretty much be your oyster. ”

1. Read. (Outstudy ‘em.)

2. Write. (Clear, concise, powerful.)

3. Talk. (Presentation mastery. Study. Practice-practice-practice. Storytelling, mastery of.)

4. Listen. (Study. Practice-practice-practice. Understand enormous power thereof.)

5. Appreciate. (Engaged. Thoughtful. Compassionate. Appreciative always, enormous power thereof.)

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The brilliant military theorist and father of Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW), William Lind, recently posted the last of his 326-part series entitled, “On War.” I always listen to what he has to say because so much of what he has predicted has come to pass. Here are some of his final thoughts on war, the US military and the future.

“In particular, the theory’s definition of Fourth Generation war has proven prophetic. Since 1989, the world has witnessed a progressive weakening of the state and rise of alternative, non-state primary loyalties, for which a growing number of men are willing to fight. That is the heart of my definition of Fourth Generation war. As Martin van Creveld says, what changes is not how war is fought, but who fights and what they fight for.”

“The second point I would close with is that the U.S. military doesn’t get it. Some European militaries do get it. Many Fourth Generation entities (not all) not only get it, they are writing the book. But the U.S. military is largely an intellectual void. Its two implied (and related) theories, that wars are decided by comparative levels of technology and by who can put the most firepower on targets, have both been proven false. Were they true, we would have won the Iraq and Afghan wars quickly. In fact, the Pentagon was so blinded by its false theories it thought we had won them quickly. Sorry, guys.

While many junior and field grade officers in the U. S. military have found value in the Four Generations framework (which says that American armed forces are not one, but two generations behind), the brass studiously ignores it. ‘Not invented here’ is part of the problem, but the larger part is that our major headquarters think little if at all about war. What they think about is money. 4GW does little to justify bigger budgets. On the contrary, it suggests that most ‘big ticket’ weapons programs are irrelevant to where war is going. That is not what the brass, or the defense companies they plan to work for after retirement, want to hear.

What might change that picture? Nothing will change in DOD until the money simply isn’t there anymore. The news, which is simultaneously good and bad, is that the money soon won’t be there. Like every previous imperial power, we are bankrupting ourselves. A trillion dollars here and a trillion dollars there, and soon it adds up to real money. The twin financing mechanisms of piling up debt and debasing the currency can only go on so long. We can already see the night at the end of the tunnel.”

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Many have now heard the news of the first U.S. government official resigning his position in protest of our continued presence in Afghanistan.  I was alerted to this development by a fellow officer and blogger, Matt Bader, and was immediately intrigued by the background of this State Department employee.

The Washington Post’s Karen DeYoung reported on Tuesday,

“When Matthew Hoh joined the Foreign Service early this year, he was exactly the kind of smart civil-military hybrid the administration was looking for to help expand its development efforts in Afghanistan.  A former Marine Corps captain with combat experience in Iraq, Hoh had also served in uniform at the Pentagon, and as a civilian in Iraq and at the State Department. By July, he was the senior U.S. civilian in Zabul province, a Taliban hotbed.”

Hoh is 36 years old.  This is significant to me because it places him in a generation, close to mine, who isn’t so heavily influenced by the Cold War-era mindset of strategy and warfare.

There has been some controversy relating to his actual role in the State Department, with DeYoung calling him a Foreign Service Officer and others calling this incorrect, stating he was a “3161″ employee brought on for a temporary cycle.  Regardless, after reading his full letter of resignation out loud to my wife this morning over coffee I felt it was worth sharing with my intelligent and discerning cadre of readers.

What strikes me is not the symbolism of such a resignation, but rather the content of his letter.  He lays out a battering ram of an argument as to why continued expenditure of blood and treasure in Afghanistan is not worth the sacrifice.  Remember, this is a seasoned Marine talking, not someone who is necessarily opposed to waging war.  Hoh says, “I’m not some peacenik, pot-smoking hippie who wants everyone to be in love.”

The following are some segments from his chilling, but important letter (emphasis mine).  Read the full letter here:

“I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan.  I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end. To put simply: I fail to see the value or worth in continued U.S. casualties or expenditures of resources in support of the Afghan government in what is, truly, a 35-year old civil war.”

Regarding the Pashtun population,

“The Pashtun insurgency, which is composed of multiple, seemingly infinite, local groups, is fed by what is perceived by the Pashtun people as a continued and sustained assault, going back centuries, on Pashtun land, culture, traditions and religion by internal and external enemies.  The U.S. and NATO presence and operations in the Pashtun valleys and villages, as well as Afghan army and police units that are led and composed of non-Pashtun soldiers and police, provide an occupation force against which the insurgency is justified.  In both RC South and East, I have observed that the bulk of the insurgency fights not for the white banner of the Taliban, but rather against the presence of foreign soldiers and taxes imposed by an unrepresentative government in Kabul.”

On why the safe-haven argument is weak (something I have written about here),

“I find specious the reasons we ask for bloodshed and sacrifice from our young men and women in Afghanistan.  If honest, our stated strategy of securing Afghanistan to prevent al-Qaeda resurgence of regrouping would require us to additionally invade and occupy western Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, etc…More so, the September 11th attacks, as well as the Madrid and London bombings, were primarily planned and organized in Western Europe; a point that highlights the threat is not one tied to traditional geographic or political boundaries.”

Or the idea that we should be there to help a failing state,

“Finally, if our concern is for a failed state crippled by corruption and poverty and under assault from criminal and drug lords, then if we bear our military and financial contributions to Afghanistan, we must reevaluate and increase our commitment to and involvement in Mexico.”

Even if the war seems worth it, we can’t afford it,

“‘We are spending ourselves into oblivion,’ a very talented and intelligent commander, one of America’s best, briefs every visitor, staff delegation and senior officer.  We are mortgaging our Nation’s economy on a war, which, even with increased commitment, will remain a draw for years to come.  Success and victory, whatever that may be, will be realized not in years, after billions more spent, but in decades and generations.  The United States does not enjoy a national treasury for such success and victory.”

This analysis of our presence in Afghanistan is not the type that will get you promoted, but it presents a formidable argument that few will be able to dismiss.  To be fair, there are many other intelligent voices who are advocating increased presence, resources and time in Afghanistan.  Some of my favorites include: Steve Coll and Andrew Exum (who posted a blistering critique of the Washington Post article mentioned above).

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Former US Air Force pilot and tech entrepreneur John Robb explains in his book, “Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization,” that, “war in the twenty-first century will be very different from what we’ve come to expect.”  Mainly, state-versus-state conflict is over (Creveld’s prophecy).  Nuclear weapons and globalization have created a situation where states have little to gain and almost everything to lose by going to war with each other.

Globalization

Instead we’ll be fighting non-state actors, or superempowered groups, Robb calls “global guerrillas.”   While globalization has unleashed amazing economic opportunities for all of us, it has also allowed for groups like al Qaeda to reap the benefits of low-cost technology, global communications, D-I-Y weaponry and information gathering.  Robb points out, the same tools we use everyday are being used against us by global guerrillas seeking to weaken and de-legitimize the state.

“Airplanes are being turned into flying bombs, cell phone networks are being used to simultaneously detonate bombs from miles away, and critical computer networks are being hacked.”

Rather than openly facing our military forces on the battlefield, most global guerrillas practice fourth-generation warfare (4GW), avoiding our strengths and exploiting our weaknesses.  One path through which they have found the most success in creating chaos is through systems disruption.  For example,

“…one small attack on an oil pipeline in southeast Iraq, conducted for an estimated $2,000, cost the Iraqi government more than $500 million in lost oil revenues.  That is a return on investment of 25 million percent.”

and in Africa,

“In February 2006, Nigerian guerrillas of the amorphous Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta attacked the loading dock on Shell Oil’s Forcados export platform.  The attackers escaped without being captured or suffering casualties.  The estimated cost of the attack was $2,000…The cost to Shell was $400,000 in lost oil exports for an estimated two weeks and the indefinite shutdown of an adjacent oil field.  The estimated lost revenue to Shell was over $50 million.  The rate of return: 25,000 times the cost of the attack.”

For now these systems attacks have been taking place in far away lands, but there’s no reason to believe our nation is immune.  Global guerrillas are operating much closer to our border than most of us realize.

Black Swans

Of course, the example that hits closest to home is 9/11 (cost $500,000 to plan and execute) – which brings us to the idea of black swans.  Nassim Taleb explains in his brilliant book, “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable,” black swans are events with the following three characteristics:

• Outlier – “…it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility.”
• Carries extreme impact
• Causes us to “concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.”

The frustrating reality is that black swans will continue to happen and there’s nothing we can do about them since, by their very nature, they’re impossible to predict.  In an increasingly interconnected world, the problem with black swans is that their impact can multiply exponentially.  Crisis in one country can easily lead to regional and global distress.

For example, the collapse of the Thai baht in 1997 led to a financial crisis all across Asia and was further linked to economic slowdowns in developing countries, the drop in oil prices, Russia’s default of 1998 and the collapse of Long Term Capital Management.  Regarding our extremely complex global system Robb warns,

“It is too complex for any single state, or group of states, to keep under control.  As a result, most of the systems we have built over the last several centuries to dampen the excesses of instability – enabled by markets, travel, communication, and other global systems – are now ineffectual.”

Resilience

How do we protect ourselves as a nation in an age marked by global guerrillas, increasing interdependence and financial volatility?  By building resilience into our networks and country.  The highly-centralized bureaucracy that characterizes much of our national security apparatus can barely keep up with the decentralized, rapidly evolving, open-source insurgencies at work around the world.

Robb feels, “the only way to ensure security in the future will be through survival and decentralized resilience.”

The term survival tends to invoke the image of surrender to impending doom, but before you go thinking this sounds like raising the white flag, Robb explains,

“A focus on survival and decentralization isn’t as simplistic or naive as it seems on first glance.  It doesn’t mean that we don’t pursue criminals, terrorists, and other threats that face us – far from it.  The state should pursue these individuals with all the means at its disposal.  It also doesn’t mean that we should attempt to remake the world in our image or attempt to fight grand battles for the hearts and minds of the world.”

At the state-level resilience means:

• Not allowing nationalism to destroy international trade
• Decentralizing security and emergency response efforts
• Decentralizing utility networks like the electrical grid – allow individuals to become both energy producers and consumers (see here)
• Thinking in terms of ecosystems and open-source networks
• Increasing sustainability, decreasing dependence

Some will dismiss Robb’s ideas and advice as far-fetched or “gloom and doom,” but they do so at their own peril. The world we live in today provides many of us with limitless possibility and freedom, but there is a collection of individuals, looming just below the surface of this new world order, who threaten to hijack globalization for their own aspirations – we must adapt to meet the challenge.

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Every once and a while I like to fill everyone in on the various books and articles I’ve been reading and finding of value.  You’ll notice immediately that much of my focus over the past several months has been on modern warfare, theory, Afghanistan and Iraq, counterinsurgency, etc.  I figured if I was going to call myself a military officer I should probably know more than the average joe on all things military.  It seems obvious, but you’d be surprised.  So, here we go:

Books:

Non-Fiction

“The Transformation of War: The Most Radical Reinterpretation of Armed Conflict Since Clausewitz” by Martin Van Creveld

Controversial, highly though-provoking read.  He covers an amazing amount of material concerning war, but his writing on nuclear weapons was a game-changer for me:

Over the last forty-five years it would be difficult to point out even a single case when a state possessing nuclear arms was able to change the status quo by threatening their use, let alone by using them.  In other words, their political effect, if any, has been merely to enforce caution and freeze existing borders.  The most important reason behind this state of affairs is, of course, that nobody has yet figured out how to wage a nuclear war without risk of global suicide.  Truth to say, nuclear weapons are instruments of mass murder.  Given that there is no defense, the only thing they are suitable for is an act of butchery that would be beyond history, and quite possibly would put an end to it.  They cannot, however, be employed for waging war in any meaningful sense of that term.

“The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century” by Colonel Thomas X. Hammes, USMC

Put simply, this is a guidebook for those seeking to understand Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW) a.k.a. the type of warfare we’re seeing today from enemies like Al-Qaeda that render most of our high-tech weaponry completely useless.  An excerpt,

Fourth-generation warfare (4GW) uses all available networks — political, economic, social, and military — to convince the enemy’s political decision makers that their strategic goals are either unachievable or too costly for the perceived benefit. It is an evolved form of insurgency. Still rooted in the fundamental precept that superior political will, when properly employed, can defeat greater economic and military power, 4GW makes use of society’s networks to carry on its fight. Unlike previous generations of warfare, it does not attempt to win by defeating the enemy’s military forces. Instead, via the networks, it directly attacks the minds of enemy decision makers to destroy the enemy’s political will. Fourth-generation wars are lengthy — measured in decades rather than months or years.

“The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One” by David Kilcullen

As one of the world’s most influential experts on guerrilla warfare, chief adviser to Gen. Petraeus during the 2007 Iraq war surge and veteran of East Timor as a member of the Australian Army, David Kilcullen has seen a new hybrid of warfare up close and he is concerned with how the West has been trying to counter it.

Kilcullen believes the “War on Terrorism” moniker has cast too wide a net over an increasingly segmented, complex and unique map of global conflict.  Our chief failure has been in understanding the differences in, “local social networks and worldwide movements; traditional and postmodern culture; local insurgencies seeking autonomy and a broader terrorist campaign.”  His model of “The Accidental Guerrilla” is the result of America and the West blurring these lines on a consistent basis.  He warns,

“…any smart enemy goes unconventional; and most enemies are likely to continue doing so, until we demonstrate the ability to prevail in irregular conflicts such as those we are currently engaged in.”

And just in case you think he might be a hard-hearted war monger, he consistently bounces around the following theme throughout the book,

“American power must be matched by American virtue, or it will ultimately harm both the United States and the global system.”

“The Jesus I Never Knew” by Philip Yancey

People who know me will attest to my leeriness when it comes to most Christian books.  More specifically, the Christian self-help variety that I once eagerly consumed, but quickly became burnt out on.  This is not a self-help book.  What Yancey does is unmask the historical Jesus in a way that makes his time and place come alive and the Gospels click.  One thing that struck me about Yancey was how well-read he is based on some of the subjects he tackles.  For example, one chapter dives into a comparison of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky’s views on Christ and salvation.  My heart swelled and I almost began blubbering all over the coffee table.

The opening quote of the book sets the tone quite nicely,

Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of by many men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness; some thought him too dark, and some too fair. One explanation… would be that he might be an odd shape. But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape…. Perhaps (in short) this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the centre. ~G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Fiction

“The Road” by Cormac McCarthy

My first Cormac McCarthy book, awesome.  I can understand why he has received so much attention as of late, his writing is spot-on.  “The Road,” is true grit.  A tale of a father and son surviving in a post-apocalyptic world, it examines the relationship between loved ones when they are utterly reliant on each other.  As I quoted earlier on my blog, the last paragraph of the book is an example of what makes McCarthy’s writing so rich,

“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”

“The Naked and the Dead” by Norman Mailer

The classic WWII novel written by Mailer at the age of 25.  That such a book could come from the mind of someone my own age blows me away.  The following comes from a 1948 New York Times review by David Dempsey,

The generation that grew to manhood on the eve of the last war was not ideally suited to saving the world for democracy. It had been blighted by depression. Its minorities–two of the characters are Jewish, one a Mexican- America–had not yet been assimilated fully into the national dream. Even the dominant groups represented competing sectional and economic interests. In peace, the differences are adjustable. In war, Mr. Mailer believes, they become intensified, for the system gives men unprecedented degrees of power. How the GI–in his less virtuous moments–got the way he did, is the subject of this novel.

“The Pillars of the Earth” by Ken Follett

Good book, a bit overrated.  Historical fiction seems like it would be tough to write, especially regarding 12th Century England, but Follett does an laudible job of teaching you about the time while making it all quite interesting.  His cast of characters are excellent from Tom the Builder to Prior Philip the monk to Lady Aliena that beautiful, sharply intelligent princess and William Hamleigh, the ultimate villain.  All are developed around the building of a massive cathedral.  Questions of Heaven and Hell, love and hate, loyalty and betrayel — all receive due attention in what is a quick-paced book for its length.  Out of all my latest readings, this is the one I’d recommend the least.

Articles:

“The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation” by William S. Lind, Colonel Keith Nightengale (USA), Captain John F. Schmitt (USMC), Colonel Joseph W. Sutton (USA), and Lieutenant Colonel Gary I. Wilson (USMCR) — **written in October 1989**

This is the original Marine Corps Gazette article that sparked much of the Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW) discussion.  A must-read for any military member.

“For about the last 500 years, the West has defined warfare. For a military to be effective it generally had to follow Western models. Because the West’s strength is technology, it may tend to conceive of a fourth generation in technological terms.

However, the West no longer dominates the world. A fourth generation may emerge from non-Western cultural traditions, such as Islamic or Asiatic traditions. The fact that some non-Western areas, such as the Islamic world, are not strong in technology may lead them to develop a fourth generation through ideas rather than technology.

The genesis of an idea-based fourth generation may be visible in terrorism. This is not to say that terrorism is fourth generation warfare, but rather that elements of it may be signs pointing toward a fourth generation.”

I include this article because as mentioned above it was written in 1989 and we know how things have turned out since then — these guys predicted the current state of modern warfare 20 years ago, there words are worth reading in detail.

“The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple is Just Fine” by Robert Capps

An interesting thing is happening in the world of tech – the best solution is often being thrown out for “good enough” and its not a laziness issue, it’s what the consumer is demanding.  Not only is this having major implications for the consumer markets, but we see it in modern warfare as well.  John Robb of Global Guerrillas points out that for the past century guerrillas have been largely dependent on the state for weapons, but now have the capabilities to produce DIY (do-it-yourself) weapons that are low-cost, but “good enough” to inflict significant harm.

Cheap, fast, simple tools are suddenly everywhere. We get our breaking news from blogs, we make spotty long-distance calls on Skype, we watch video on small computer screens rather than TVs, and more and more of us are carrying around dinky, low-power netbook computers that are just good enough to meet our surfing and emailing needs. The low end has never been riding higher.

So what happened? Well, in short, technology happened. The world has sped up, become more connected and a whole lot busier. As a result, what consumers want from the products and services they buy is fundamentally changing. We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished. Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect. These changes run so deep and wide, they’re actually altering what we mean when we describe a product as “high-quality.”

“Nassim Taleb on the economy: ‘We still have the same disease’” by Margaret Wente

Today we still have the same amount of debt, but it belongs to governments. Normally debt would get destroyed and turn to air. Debt is a mistake between lender and borrower, and both should suffer. But the government is socializing all these losses by transforming them into liabilities for your children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. What is the effect? The doctor has shown up and relieved the patient’s symptoms – and transformed the tumour into a metastatic tumour. We still have the same disease. We still have too much debt, too many big banks, too much state sponsorship of risk-taking. And now we have six million more Americans who are unemployed – a lot more than that if you count hidden unemployment.

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First off, if you’re involved in any type of business or organizational leadership and you’re not reading Seth Godin, you are wrong. I have yet to read his books (shame on me), but I have been following his blog for about a year now and have been impressed. His posts are always short, memorable and packed with value.

Seth recently wrote a post called, “The Hierarchy of Success” where he said the following:

I think it looks like this:

1. Attitude
2. Approach
3. Goals
4. Strategy
5. Tactics
6. Execution

We spend all our time on execution. Use this word instead of that one. This web host. That color. This material or that frequency of mailing.

Big news: No one ever succeeded because of execution tactics learned from a Dummies book.

Tactics tell you what to execute. They’re important, but dwarfed by strategy. Strategy determines which tactics might work.

But what’s the point of a strategy if your goals aren’t clear, or contradict?

Which leads the first two, the two we almost never hear about.

Approach determines how you look at the project (or your career). Do you read a lot of books? Ask a lot of questions? Use science and testing or go with your hunches? Are you imperious? A lifehacker? When was the last time you admitted an error and made a dramatic course correction? Most everyone has a style, and if you pick the wrong one, then all the strategy, tactics and execution in the world won’t work nearly as well.

As far as I’m concerned, the most important of all, the top of the hierarchy is attitude. Why are you doing this at all? What’s your bias in dealing with people and problems?

As much as this is true for the business world, the military could take some cues from this hierarchy as well. Everyone loves talking tactics and execution because they’re immediate and tangible. Generals can be satisfied they’ve accomplished something as they watch a Predator feed showing a strike that they signed off on. But strategy? Goals? I don’t hear as much real conversation going on about these items and that worries me (I admit, they could be going on and just not making it all the way down the pile to little guys like me…but, I’m skeptical).

In the fog and friction of war it is very easy to become saturated in the day-to-day details and soon forget why we’re fighting in the first place, I see it ALL THE TIME. Since 4GW plays out at the moral level (a battle of ideas) understanding the reason we fight is of the utmost importance. Regarding Afghanistan, it is worrisome that, as a country, we are still unclear on the main objective(s) of a continued presence. As Andrew Exum, Abu Muqawama (of the Center for a New American Security) wrote last month,

Last week, I flew to Boston to give a talk on Afghanistan to a collection of senior-level government officials from the United States and abroad as part of the Kennedy School’s Executive Education Program. All credit goes to the excellent audience — which happily agreed to listen to a talk on strategy and operations from a 31-year old and peppered me with some great, thought-provoking questions. But without a doubt the most persistent questions I received were along the lines of “What are we doing in Afghanistan and why are we there in the first place?”

The fact that these are the questions that I am now receiving from career public servants in our nation’s departments and agencies should be a huge warning bell for the administration. And it means that Kagan is exactly right — this is now Obama’s war, and he and Stan McChrystal need to explain to the American people in non-IR-speak why we are in Afghanistan and what we are doing there. (Hint: if you cannot explain your policy to folks in the 3rd Congressional District of Tennessee in a way they can understand it, you might need to change your policy.)

Unclear goals and strategy lead to ineffective tactics and execution. It has to be goals and strategy before tactics and execution, not after….and we haven’t even touched on attitude or approach (discussions for another day).

Whether in the business world or the military Godin’s Hierarchy of Success is a great paradigm from which we can all learn a great deal. Thanks Mr. Godin!

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