Stratfor had a good article a few days back regarding Chavez’s latest nationalization push. While certain to shrink the already unbalanced Venezuelan economy, this move indicates how dropping oil prices (combined with stagnent Venezuelan production) drives the state’s need to find new revenue sources. In a key summary: “Venezuela’s economic situation is decidedly less than sound. With more than half of the government’s budget heavily dependent on oil, Venezuela is extremely sensitive to even relatively minor shifts in crude prices… With crude prices dropping, increased competition from the Saudis and Chavez’s mismanagement and underdevelopment in the oil sector, Venezuela is in a difficult spot.”

The mismanagement and underdevelopment of Venezuelan oil infrastructure must be emphasized. The state cannot even meet its OPEC quota and, due to Chavez’s international spending sprees, the cash from the past few years of booming prices has already been squandered without necessary infrastructure investments.

Paul Cella has an article today on TCS asking how we can force insurgent forces to give us battle. His reasoning is as follow:

…our enemy will not fight. He avoids battle like few adversaries we have come to grips with before.
I say that one of our strategies in this war should be to maneuver our enemies into a real battle, or series of them.
…In many ways his weaknesses are our strengths, and ours his. Thus, as one of our overwhelming strengths is military might, we must set our minds upon the question of how we can force him to give us battle.

Cella falls into a trap that has caught many others. The reasoning goes as follows. If we could just force the enemy to commit himself to a decisive battle, then we could demolish him once and for all and finally go home. Like Foreman looking for that one KO punch again Ali in the Rumble in the Jungle, the US spent much of the Vietnam War looking for the chance to bring first the Vietcong and then the North Vietnamese to decisive battle. In both cases, that moment never materialized the way the US or Foreman expected it to.

Instead of trying to get our enemy to fight us the way we’d like them to, we ought to be probing the enemy for weaknesses which we can then exploit to disrupt his cohesion and create non-cooperative centers of gravity. Cella touches on this when he speaks of trying to “provoke the enemy to recklessness,” but he can still only think in terms of climatic battles. He only seeks to provoke the enemy’s recklessness in order to “drive him en masse into the field of battle, and keep him there… Once this is done, I think our military forces will be eminently capable of delivering him savage repulses, and pursuing these to resounding victories against him.”

Cella gets close to something actually useful when he speaks of attacking our adversaries minds. By getting “a better handle on the enemy’s inherent mental vulnerabilities… we [can] discover his points of psychological pressure, the advantages he presents to us by virtue of his own character…” The problem is, he offers no insights into how such advantages are discovered or exploited. Contrast this with the detailed descriptions and assessments of Muckian’s article.

Cella’s article illustrates the pitfalls of remaining devoted to the dream of a decisive battle. Anyone who persists in searching for a heroric final clash will be a pawn in the hands of even a medicore guerilla. We can never force an adversary to play to our strengths. We can, however, adapt ourselves to exploit an aversaries’ weakness. Understanding this is a first step in adapting to reality, which is a prerequisite for useful strategic thought.

Wretchard and Robb have already commented on Martin Muckian’s “Structural Vulnerabilities of Networked Insurgencies” in the latest issue of Parameters. If you haven’t already done so, I highly encourage you to check it out.

One of the key points Muckian makes is that networked insurgencies do not necessarily have strong political cohesion.

As long as the network confronts issues that are within the shared story of the narrative, it can maintain its unity. If issues outside the narrative arise, however, such as the elections or an agenda for the future of Iraq, the network loses its cohesion as groups respond according to their own ideology. The network may be capable of reaching a consensus, but this takes time. This disjointedness demonstrates that the political cohesion of a networked insurgency is directly vulnerable in a way the Maoist revolutionaries were not.

These shared narratives and doctrine represent the schwepunkt of the insurgents’ orientation. In order to disrupt this,

Attack the narrative by forcing the insurgency to respond to issues that are outside its scope—this can disrupt or even fracture the movement as each group responds to the issue according to its own ideology. Ideological differences are a primary cause of fracturing within networked groups. A counterinsurgency should take every opportunity to disrupt its adversary by promoting internal dissension.

Muckian is on the right track here. He sets the proper context. Building on earlier work that examined the difference between Maoist insurgencies and the current Iraqi insurgency, Muckian takes the next step of analyzing the vulnerabilities of the Iraqi form of insurgency. Some of his specific recommendations need further development, as Robb pointed out in his post. For example, Robb criticizes Muckian for recommending that COIN forces directly attack the IT infrastructure of insurgents, since this same infrastructure is also used for legimiate economic activity. Instead of attacking the infrastructure, COIN forces ought to use the IT infrastructure to disrupt and confuse the insurgents’ orientation.