A great big, giant hat tip to Henrik over at Draconian Observations for catapulting an excellent article onto the top of my reading pile: Tony Corn’s article on World War IV as Fourth Generation Warfare. We’ll see when I can get to this…

A picture of a domestic Sys-Admin force looks like:

Black ministers in Boston, responding to a surge in youth violence, have launched a drive to recruit, train, and deploy 1,000 volunteers to work with at-risk young people from the city’s toughest and poorest neighborhoods.

The initiative, the largest undertaken since the youth crime wave of the early 1990s, aims to greatly expand the ministers’ street-level involvement in fighting violence. It also seeks to revive the community-police partnership that was a key factor in the drastic reduction in the city’s homicide rate from 1996 until last year.

Stable and sustainable order is about more than just police enforcement. It is about developing the fabric of a community - an approach that has shown success before:

The police department will help train volunteers and will develop deployment strategies for the initiative, which is being launched by the Boston TenPoint Coalition, a group of churches and faith-based organizations founded in 1992 to combat gang violence.

The first 100 volunteers are nearing the end of their training and will be deployed on neighborhood walks, home visits, and mentoring assignments after a final training session with Police Superintendent Paul Joyce next week.

The volunteers will try to build trust between neighborhood residents and police, improve police response to community problems, and reconnect community groups to young people, TenPoint leaders say.

…'’There is a realization that we’ve been asleep at the wheel,” said the Rev. Jeffrey L. Brown, a Dorchester resident and pastor of Union Baptist Church in Cambridge, speaking of the clergy, law-enforcement agencies, and social service organizations that collaborated so effectively in the 1990s that their work became known nationally as ‘’the Boston miracle.”

Last summer there was a smaller scale effort with a similar philosophy that caught my eye. Lyndhurst Street had been characterized as a “Hell Zone:”

…residents and activists say the corner is in state of lawlessness. They say young people from other neighborhoods take care of their illegal business on Lyndhurst because they know they can get away with it.

In response, the Rev. Bruce Wall of Global Ministries Christian Church decided to “occupy” the street for a week.

At the beginning of the Rev. Bruce Wall’s weeklong occupation of Lyndhurst Street, he and six followers did exactly what they had set out to do: They tried to confront the bands of dope dealers, prostitutes, and other young people who were hanging out at night on the street corner that some residents call the Hell Zone.

But by the middle of the week, Wall had a gang of his own: about three-dozen Boston police officers, MBTA police, probation officers, city councilors, clergymen, cameramen, and flashing police cruisers were at his side.

Everyone agreed that the effort made the street safer in the short term. But, as in counterinsurgency warfare, the ability to remain in an area and maintain the gains is a challenge:

‘’They’ll be back when all this is over,” said Jimmy Ambroise, 16… referring to the characters who strike fear in Lyndhurst residents at night.

Rev. Wall has been maintaining a presence on the street and there have been some positive signs:

‘’It’s probably stopped some people from running a very profitable business on that corner,” said Emmett Folgert, director of the Dorchester Youth Collaborative. ‘’Even if things don’t change right now, a seed is planted.”

I used the counterinsurgency comparision very deliberately. Nobody is going to confuse Dorchester for Ramadi, but the challenges presented by each lie on a continuum with peace, harmony and security at one extreme and a Hobbesian state of nature on the other. While there is no single silver bullet strategy for transitioning a region from one extreme to the other, there are strategies that have been shown to be successful over certain portions of the continuum. Just as a successful counterinsurgency campaign needs to involve more than just military force, developing and securing urban neighborhoods needs more than just police officers. The hot questions become: are there successful networking approaches (social networks, collaborative online tools, inter-agency iniatives, public-private sector partnerships) that can be collected? Could we develop a toolkit of techniqes, technologies and strategies that would make us better at this, so we don’t have to keep re-inventing the wheel? Can we reach the point where there is an established body of expertise concerning these problems? What would be the Detriot equivalent of the Boston TenPoint Coalition? What would the Afghan equivalent look like?

That’s what Sys-Admin means to me.

William Lind doesn’t like the new name for the GWOT. It is easy to sympathize with him - who can get behind such an unweildy acronym? But his specific complaints with the new term - “The Long War” - aren’t convincing me. Lind is concerned that the war is framed in maximalist terms, which he sees as unnecessarily broad and impossible to achieve:

Either they will succeed in turning us into Taliban-style Muslims or we will turn them into happy consumers in globalism’s Brave New World. Since most Americans would rather be dead than Talibs and most pious Moslems would rather perish than lose their souls to Brave New World, Mr. Rumsfeld has proclaimed a war of mutual annihilation.

While I sympathize with Lind’s concern of how such statements of purpose will be interpreted by Muslim populations, I am frustrated to high heaven by his misrepresentation of globalization. It is not a question of consumerism, it is a question of flows. To what degree will you permit content, people and capital to flow across and within your territory? Globalization is defined by a minimalist rule set. It is not a list of what one must do, it is a short list of things that one must refrain from doing. Despite this, Lind characterizes expanded globalization as a maximalist objective.

Lind feels that less ambitious objectives ought to be considered - such as to state that we want “to be left alone in our part of the globe, to enjoy peace, prosperity and an ordered liberty at home, while we left Islamics alone in their traditional territories.” It is easy enough to propose such an alternative, but how feasible is it? For that matter, how desirable is it? How much seperation is necessary in order to leave “Islamics alone?” Do we have to stop trading with them? Do we have to stop investing money in their economies? How far do the “traditional territories” of Muslims extend? Does India count? How about Spain? Again, Lind misses the boat due to globalization. We could isolate ourselves from anywhere in the world that there were individuals who felt threatened by the flow of our money, our television, our movies, our music and our products. But the global population would pay a heavy cost in its standard of living.

It really isn’t any wonder that Lind harbors such vitriol for Barnett, since Lind doesn’t recognize the minimal nature of of the globalization rule set. No, Lind sees it as MAXIMAL:

[Barnett] would create an inescapable new world order that bears a remarkable resemblance to the one Aldous Huxley described in his short novel Brave New World, published in the 1930s – a “soft totalitarianism” where the first rule is, “you must be happy.” Happiness, in turn, is a product of endless materialism, consumerism, sensual pleasure and psychological conditioning. If that sounds like a good description of American popular culture, it is exactly that culture Barnett proposes to force down the throat of every person on earth…

As long as Lind insists on portraying globalization in such a manner, his ability to accurately describe our current strategic environment will be severely handicapped.

I took so long to comment on Fabius Maximus’s first article The Myth of Grand Strategy that he got out a second article before I had written anything about the first.

At the rate this is going I won’t ever catch up, so I’m going to jump right to FabMax’s second article The Fate of Israel. He opens with the following:

To plan a successful grand strategy the strategist must know if he has a weak or strong position. Failure almost certainly results if he gets this fundamental fact wrong. Realist or idealist, this is the starting point for developing a grand strategy.

I would say that a successful grand strategy starts with an accurate description of the world but the fundamental point is the same. We need to accurately describe the world if we are going to respond to it in an intelligent manner.

So, what does our world look like? Fabius argues that in our current geopolitical climate, “a stateless people with no modern government, economy or army” can be more powerful than a developed state. The rest of his article examines the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and argues that it illustrates how the global strategic environment places states in a weak position.

The first great Palestinian strategic advantage Fabius cites is the moral advantage produced by their underdog status. This leads to “support by important elements in the developed nations and most less-developed states… giving themselves and their supporters belief that they have the moral high ground.” This may be true in certain circles, but Fabius does not address the strategic blunders Palestinians have made since the first Intifada. Col. Hammes has discussed the deliberate way in which the leaders of the first Intifada created media messages and images to claim the moral high ground.: images of teenagers throwing rocks at heavily armored Israeli security forces, or eloquent and reasonable spokesmen, dressed in Western-style suits, explaining their greivences on Western television networks. The al-Asqa Intifada lost this strategic clarity. Writing on page 116 of The Sling and the Stone, Hammes writes that “…Arafat did not understand 4GW. .. he managed to destroy the Palestinian’s hard-won image as a peaceful people resisting a brutal occupying force.” A few pages later, Hammes expands upon this assertion:

To date, the al-Aqsa Intefada has reversed the international perception of Israeli and Palestinian roles of Intefada I. The Palestinians are now the side with major image problems in the West. Resorting to suicide bombings and declarations about the destruction of Israel squandered the international image they built up during the six painful years of the Intefada. Instead of effective messages sent to their internal, Israeli and Western audiences, the Palestinian leadership has sent incredibly damaging messages to each group.
…The Palestinain suicide bombing campaign succeeded in transforming the image of Israeli settlements from an impedement to peace to a key component of Israel’s survival.

Moral strength does not automatically flow to the weaker side in a conflict. Weakness has the potential to be a profound advantage, but only if exploited correctly. Palestinian leaders haven’t always been able to do this and won’t necessarily be able to always do it in the future.

This brings us to the $64,000 question: do non-state groups hold the strategic high ground in the early 21st Century?

Fabius feels that the “primal strategies” weilded by non-state groups give them a strategic advantage:

The Palestinians show us the raw power of a primal strategy, a belief in a shared dream. They dream about the extermination of Israel. That is the official goal of Fatah, the former ruling party. Which is in turn losing strength to Hamas and Hezbollah, who seem even more dedicated to eliminating Israel. Their primal strategy forges the Palestinian people into a powerful weapon, against which Israel has few defenses.,

But the power of this shared dream is not absolute. Non-state groups face all the same centripital forces that all human groups do. Competing desires and different priorities break the monolithic power of the single shared dream. For example, Fatah lost power to Hamas not because Hamas was more dedicated to eliminating Israel, but because Hamas represented an alternative to the corruption and inefficiency of Fatah. Consider:

Three quarters of all Palestinians, including more than 60 percent of Hamas supporters, are willing to support reconciliation between Palestinians and Israelis based on a two-state solution. During the last 10 years, the trend among the Palestinians has been to move away from hard-line attitudes and to embrace moderate ones. Indeed, more than 60 percent of Hamas voters support an immediate return to negotiations with Israel.
…The two most important issues for the voters were corruption in the Palestinian Authority—which is dominated by Fatah—and the inability of the PA to enforce law and order. On both counts Hamas posed a clear alternative, with its reputation for discipline and incorruptibility.

Fabius cites Israeli vulnerabilities over the long term (emigration and incremental surrender) yet he does not ever question the vulnerabilities of the Palestinian’s shared dream. How do we know that in 100 years the shared dream underlying their primal strategy will remain?

The 4GW perspective is valuable because it considers novel and potentially crippling vulnerabilities of states. Clearly, non-state actors have gained power during the past six decades and we need to examine the consequences of this. However, 4GW theorists have yet to convince me that non-state actors have gained enough power to give them the strategic advantage. This would require an examination of the relative strength of states and non-state groups.