A major pipeline in Nigeria exploded today. The Red Cross currently puts the death toll at 100; I fear that number will rise before all is said and done.

John Robb has been tracking the growth of system disruption attacks in Nigeria. He even had a post up earlier to day (or late last night) where he discussed recent statements from the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) expressing the desire to further decrease Niger’s oil production, but it has disappeared. When I read the headline my first thought was, “another GG attack.”

MEND, however, denies responsibility. Jomo Gbomo, the email-based spokesman of MEND, said in an email to Bloomberg that

All this works to our advantage in some ways… [but w]e wouldn’t want to kill so many innocents in any attack… I’m not a part of it.

One alternative explanation is that the explosion was an accident (due to the large number of villagers who had been stealing fuel from the pipe).

This is total speculation, but it is still possible that MEND was responsible for the explosion. It may have decided to deny responsibility upon seeing the atrocious death toll. Since it seems that most of the victims of the explosion were Nigerians, MEND may have been concerned about destroying domestic support for their movement - as Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda in Iraq organization damaged its standing among Iraqs due to its attacks upon Iraqi civilians.

As Robb has articulated in the past, one of the strengths of system disruption attacks is that they do not generally require killing. This has a range of benefits for global guerillas. First, it is easier for people to destroy inanimate objects than to take another human’s life. This makes it easier to recruit people to execute attacks. Second, since there are few deaths, the guerillas maintain a moral advantage relative to their opponents (who, if they are not careful, can appear hyperbolic if they resort to violence). To claim responsibility for this sort of massively fatal attack would contradict these tenets of GG strategy.

As I said, this is only speculation, but I think it provides a plausible reason for why MEND would want to deny responsibility.

Back in December I commented upon the significance of DoD 3000. To my surprise, when looking at what sites have been linking to OSD, I discovered that a surprising number of folks have been finding their way here through google searches for “DoD 3000.” Which led me to look at what they’ve been looking at, which in turn led me to two perspectives I didn’t catch at the time: Fred Kaplan and Douglas Johnson.

Kaplan emphasizes the need to follow up on the directive with incentives, specific goals and budget authority. Otherwise, he warns, it won’t be taken seriously and it will be “waved off as empty rhetoric.”

Johnson has similar concerns, arguing that the directive

really does nothing more than direct the establishment of policies, the conduct of exercises and the offer to other U.S. Government (USG) departments to “come train with us” once we figure out what that training will be.

So, what has happened since then? First of all, President Bush signed National Security Presidential Directive 44 which made the State Department the lead federal agency for stability operations. DoD followed up by establishing a stability operations office in the Pentagon and then got a British Colonel to run it (subscription required).

So this is a mixed bag. If stability operations are supposed to be given “priority comparable to combat operations,” an office in the Pentagon isn’t going to make that happen by itself. After all, where is the warfighting operations office in the Pentagon? On the other hand, individual services have already been adapting on their own, which gives these higher-level iniatives some momentum. There have been numerous articles, for example, detailing how the Army has turned its desert training range at Fort Irwin from a Cold War-centric tank battlefield into a counterinsurgency labratory complete with (fake) al-Jazera reports and roadside bombs. (On a lighter note, I was paralyzed by a spasm of guffaws when I read that Carl Weathers, aka Apollo Creed of Rocky fame, has been coaching the “insurgents” on their acting abilities.) Another example of gathering momenum was the Army’s 2005 Strategic Planning Guidance (SPG), which emphasized the need to improve stability operations (subscription required).

One angle that none of these articles addressed, however, was the question of how to prepare for close collaboration with everyone from USAID to foreign governments to global NGOs and private businesses. Tom Barnett and John Robb have been thinking a great deal about (with Enterra Solutions, of course, leading the way in the private sector).

The big buzzword here is service oriented architectures (SOA). True, on-the-fly interoperation and adaptation requires services. Imagine USAID being able to use DoD logistics services, for example. Or suppose that during a humanitarian relief operation, a global guerilla group starts attacking the trucks delivering the aid shipments. Suddenly convoys need to be organized to protect the trucks. How to draw together all of the NGO, private businesses donating goods and the military resources? Use the pre-existing logistics and personnel services to assemble a service. The platform is the center of gravity where all the players can come together and get integrated. I was thinking a month or two ago about an “off-the-shelf” logistics toolkit for NGOs along these lines. Building such a toolkit (which is what Rathyon’s DIB, described by Robb, would enable) would be a huge step towards improving our ability to deal with MOOTW and its what I’ve always imagined Barnett meant when he was talking about the US being the “Hub” of the SysAdmin force.

I’m starting to move a little fast and loose here, but I think the idea still comes through.