Very interesting visualization of US troop deployments to different regions over the past five decades. Of particular interest are the shifting strategic priorities that one can see reflected in the data. Take a look at Africa, for example. One can see the deprioritization of the continent from the 1970s through the 1990s (with the brief Somalian expedition), and then the modest deployments to Djibouti in an attempt to address the attempts of global salafi militants to use this region as strategic base.

Some other folks have already highlighted this, but seven Chinese citizens were abducted yesterday during an attack on a Chinese-run oil facility in eastern Ethiopia.

Chinese oil companies are increasingly vulnerable to attacks and other political violence as they aggressively expand their operations in some of Africa’s most sensitive hot spots, international observers said yesterday.

The warnings came after gunmen attacked a Chinese-run oil field operation in eastern Ethiopia yesterday, killing more than 60 Ethiopian workers and nine Chinese managers. Seven Chinese were believe to have been abducted during the attack, according to the country’s official news agency.

Elizabeth Economy, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, said it is unlikely the oil field was targeted because of its Chinese connection, but rather, the Chinese found themselves caught in a regional conflict.

“No matter what China says in its diplomatic forays about China’s presence being different, it is going to encounter the same challenges that every other oil company and country faces when it goes into disputed areas in challenging parts of Africa,” Ms. Economy said.

Stratfor argues that China’s surge of activity in Africa has stripped away its previous immunity to accusations of imperialism. The resource rewards and political capitol of engaging Africa are key to China’s continued rise towards great power status. Such engagement, however, risks draining Chinese resources and suffering attacks against its facilities.

Wenran Jiang, director of the University of Alberta’s China Institute, said Chinese companies are only now coming to grips with the political risks that are associated with doing business in violence-prone countries.

“The Chinese leaders are becoming more and more aware of the severe situation in these unstable countries where they have put in quite a bit of investment,” Mr. Wenran said.

These sorts of events will force China to confront the same SysAdmin challenges that other globalizing nations face. Simply by virtue of their power and association with spreading connectivity, China’s overseas face becomes a target. This threat environment will drive increased Chinese investment in what Barnett refers to as SysAdmin capabilities. This will also drag China into regional conflicts, which will accelerate the convergence between its problem set and that of American foreign policy.

On a completely different note, Brave New War next on my reading list, just like everyone else. This, incidentally, is a great example of a blog herding behavior that I’ve noticed before. Past examples include Muckian’s article on networked insurgencies, or McFate and Packer’s articles on COIN and anthropology. During a stampede, the book or article in question is thoroughly dissected and used to interpret current events until the pack exhausts itself.

Caught a BBC bit on the radio this morning about the first performance of Beethoven in Sub-Saharan Africa. It was a striking reminder of just how disconnected the Gap is from the Core. One commentator goes so far as to say that “in terms of global cultural crossovers, this is as major as debt cancellation.”

Pentagon Weighing News and Spin - LA Times

Gen. Petraeus has proposed changing policies dating back to the Vietnam War regulating the relationship between information operations (IO) and public affairs (PA).

Those who favor more aggressive information management believe public affairs officials should work for information operations offices.

Military officials in Baghdad say Petraeus does not want to try to manage the news; they insist he is not interested in extreme changes. Under the Petraeus plan, public affairs officials would continue to work directly for unit commanders, but would coordinate extensively with information officers.

One the one hand we have those who are worried about PA and IO personnel working at cross purposes. On the other hand we have those who are worried that any modification of the existing policies will only harm the military’s credibility.

Although many public affairs officials trust Petraeus, some fear that other commanders, who may care less about the military’s credibility with the press, could use Petraeus’ policy request to subordinate public affairs officials to information operations officers.

Information operations may encompass what the military calls psychological operations — a range of persuasion techniques to influence local populations in foreign countries. Operations can be as simple as spreading truthful information via a loudspeaker truck or giving deliberately false information on a televised broadcast.

The article offers no concrete ideas for how to address this tension between IO and PA missions

The senior officer close to Petraeus said that information operations officers in Baghdad are not engaging in deception, so there was little risk to military credibility.

“Public affairs officers will not be involved in deception operations,” the officer said. “There are red lines public affairs will not cross. They will not jeopardize their credibility.”

Others are more skeptical of Petraeus’ request, believing that the information operations officers engage in deception at times and that military spokespeople must steer well clear.

“They will tell you” psychological operations “is always truthful. But you know how the game works,” said a senior defense official.

Those who favor rescinding or altering the Myers memo argue that it is better for public affairs officers to know what information officers are up to, so as to better prevent misleading information from filtering back to the U.S.But other Pentagon officials say that as soon as information operations and public affairs start working together regularly, reporters will start questioning the information they are getting.

A far deeper issue is the sheer imposibility of preventing misleading information from filtering back to the US. If globalization means anything it means that the increasing flows of people, goods, ideas and capital are connecting formerly isolated regions. This means that, short of short-circuiting globalization itself, it will be impossible to insulate our domestic audience from disinformation intended for an overseas audience. Furthermore, the flow goes both ways. Thus, any honest and truthful PA content targeted for a domestic audience is immediately available to an international audience, which could potentially undermine an overseas IO effort.

Given these realities of the global media commons, the article’s implied vision of two distinct messages (one accurate, the other potentially deceptive) for two distinct audiences may simply not be possible. I wonder if part of the friction comes from the COIN environment in which the PA and IO personnel are operating. What does it mean to influence, disrupt, usurp and corrupt human adversaries in a COIN environment? While there is a small cadre of enemy actors who we wish to disrupt and deceive, if we treat the entire population like this we’ll thwart our goals.

To paraphrase Boyd, if we find ourselves lying to sway others, maybe we need to rethink our ends.

In the COIN and stability operations we will be confronted with in the years ahead, radical transparency could do a great deal to resolve the apparent schizophrenic relationship within DoD between PA and IO. Demonstrating that we will be forthright and honest, even when the news isn’t the best, provides our forces with a key moral advantage.

The inter-service competition for money doesn’t just arise over out-year POMs. NYTimes reports today that:

The Army has announced that it would squeeze out money for the continuing war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan by requesting the temporary transfer of $1.6 billion from Air Force and Navy payrolls and slowing the purchase of spare parts and other supplies not bound for those countries. It also said it would freeze new civilian hires and suspend some service contracts.

This pressure on the Air Force payroll is especially noteworthy because of the USAF’s recent cut of 30,000 positions. Recapitalizing the USAF’s fleet puts pressure on the service’s budget at the same time that the Army’ s budgetary needs are squeezing Air Force funding. This is an important and complex dynamic to track.

Ultimately, the Army measures described are less cost saving and more cost deferment. Short term buys and short term contracts are more expensive (think of the cost savings offered to you in your personal life if you’ll commit to a longer service contract or a multi-year subscription). Thus, not only is the budget getting crunched in the short term, but it will continue to be crunched in the long term as these deferred costs come due. We can wrestle with getting our budgetary priorities aligned now or we can pay more later in reduced capability and higher costs.

Good analysis from Stratfor today on the growing East Asian focus on navel power. The focus here is on amphibious warfare ships for force projection, not aircraft carriers. Why? Because humanitarian relief and peacekeeping operations are more likely than full-on military conflicts and Japan, South Korea and Australia are working to improve their capabilities for these missions.

In all of this, the analysis wonders aloud if China’s focus on building an indigenous aircraft carrier isn’t missing the boat (pun intended). A carrier by itself is enormously expensive and complicated (witness the repeated Soviet failures to build a functional operational carrier) yet offers precious little in the way of peacekeeping capability. The amphibious warfare ships being built by Australia, South Korea and Japan, on the other hand, offer a flexible force-projection capability for operations ranging from peacekeeping to stability operations to disaster relief to full-on shooting war. The money China devotes to carriers must come at the expense of something, and it could very well be this sort of force projection capability.

While the analysis raises the spectre of America losing its monopoly on large-scale, quick-reaction assistance, this growing SysAdmin capability represents an enormous opportunity. Orchestrated within a cohesive strategic vision, these forces are well on the way to developing an international SysAdmin force capable of sharing the load of responding to “dozens of small flare-ups across the region in the next decade.”

Hat tip to Dr. Barnett’s blog for pointing me to Stephen Pinker’s great essay, A History of Violence.

Pinker is one our great public intellectuals, able to constructively synthesize vast swaths of research into cogent summaries. I agree with a sociobiologist friend of mine who likes to say that anyone claiming to be well-educated should read The Blank Slate.

In this essay, Pinker examines the wealth of historical data that indicates that violence per capita has been steadily decreasing in human society. He cites Lawrence Keeley’s archeological research that indicates the prevalence of violence in tribal soceities. Pinker also references Stephen LeBlanc’s work which has explored why Western anthropologists have overlooked so much of pre-industrial violence. More recent data moves out of the realm of archeology, anthropology and sociobiology into the realm of political science. The common political science data sets for tracking warfare over the past century all indicate that a steep drop-off in state-based warfare. An interesting research question would be to try to quantify the losses to non-state warfare (because I can already hear the 4GW crowd pointing out that I just said “state-based warfare”), though based on Keeley and LeBlanc’s work I don’t believe that current or near-term rises in non-state violence come anywhere close to the levels found in tribal societies.

Pinker brings up the role of modernity as a “civilizing process” as a possible explanation for this drop in violence. A possible supporting mechanism for this change on an evolutionary time scale might have been selection for juvenile characteristics. A few years ago I studied some very interesting sociobiological theories of how selection pressures can lead to “domesticated” traits. Examples include bonobos relative to chimps and domesticated dogs relative to wolves. Domesticated traits have, historically, been mistaken by scientists as simply the junvenile characteristics of another species. Bonobos, for example, were long assumed to simply be junvenile chips and it was not until they were tracked over long periods of time that primatetologists recgonized them as a distinct species.

The argument goes that such “domesticated” species are less aggressive, more sexually active, and more open to cooperation than their non domesticated counterparts. Experiments involving selective breeding of wolves for these traits found that within a very few generations the fully mature wolves began to look more like juveniles (with larger heads in proportion to their bodies, slighter figures and less prominant teeth) and act more like juveniles. The argument concludes by comparing Homo Sapiens to Neanderthals, we can see a similar transformation taking place.

All of this means that while the mechanisms of violence remain within each of us (as Dave Grossman has explored at length in his indispensible On Killing), we’ve been doing something right. So even though, as Neal Stephenson likes to say, our genetic heritage provides us the ability to be Stupendous Badasses when situations demand, this does not condemn us to a life of violence.

Huh. I totally missed this last month. Seems to have been spun two opposite ways. Folks who fear that the the Bush Administration is trying to re-run the Iraq War engine to provoke war with Iran see it as a move to install a neocon ally in DoS to keep those diplomats in line. Others, however, see it as a possible move by Rice to preempt neocon attacks as she begins to engage regimes like Syria and Iran to disengage the US from Iraq.

Interesting tidbit to keep track of, though I don’t like to get too mired in the DC games of who’s up and who’s down.