Got around to reading Laurence Iannaccone’s The Market for Martyrs. Iannaccone makes a compelling case, based on the academic literature, for why it is incorrect to view suicide terrorist and the organizations that manage them as irrational, mentally stunted or economically destitute. Drawing a compelling comparison to fears about the rise of cults and fringe religious groups brainwashing converts during the 1970s, he argues that suicide terrorism and participation in religiously-motivated global insurgent movements depends not on brainwashing but rather on social ties.

One theme that I would have like to see Iannaccone develop further is why healthy, relatively prosperous and well-educated people with relatively few or weak social ties are more likely to join these sorts of movements. I contend that they are seeking the close social bonds and sense of belonging that forms an essential part of feeling secure and happy in one’s life. Being social creatures, we cannot thrive on material comforts alone. The global Salafi militant movement leverages the sense of social isolation experienced by populations encountering the unsettlingly rapid and impersonal pace of change brought about by globalization. Since they only need to pull in a tiny fraction of all of those who feel this way, trying to eliminate the supply side of global Salafi militants is not feasible.

Iannaccone’s ultimate policy recommendation - changing market conditions so that religious organizations that create demand for suicide attackers will have to compete with other more moderate religious organizations that do not act on violent rhetoric - completely aligns with this further detail. When one drills down to this resolution, it illustrates why more competition addresses the underlying dynamic of people struggling to find their way in an impersonal and disorienting world of material prosperity and disruptive change. When Tyler Durden isn’t the only way an isolated young man with few social ties has to find meaning in his life, then Project Mayham faces stiffer competition for recruits. Exactly the sort of systemic change we’re looking for.

Some other nuggets I clipped as I read:

Belief typically follows involvement. Strong attachments draw people into religious groups, but strong beliefs develop more slowly or never develop at all.

Ties nicely in with Marc Sageman’s work exploring the central role social bonds (and not belief) play in global Salafi militant recruitment.

Supply of killers: Sadly, the basic supply of labor is readily available. Many people can be induced to steal, riot, vandalize, kill, or commit acts other acts of violence, protest, and civil disobedience. Indeed, societies devote substantial effort to limit the voluntary supply of such activities. Increased risk of capture, injury, or death certainly tends to reduce supply, but keep in mind that the number called upon to die is very small relative to the total number working for the firm. Ex ante, the typical worker may face risks no greater than those endured by most criminals or war-time soldiers.

Can’t make the goal being ending all human-vs-human violence.

Terrorist firms can function effectively even if the supply of suicide-killers is extremely small. Even a few successful suicide bombings can cause widespread terror.

Again, why eliminating the supply side is infeasible.

Team production: Costs and complexity are further increased by the need to obtain workers able to kill and willing to die. One cannot hire such people as one does office clerks, or even contract killers. They must be “produced” through a social process that involves recruitment, interaction, and training. Tremendous effort is required to build commitment, maintain obedience, and prevent defection. With greater sacrifice comes more selective recruiting, more intense training, and more extensive group activity. Not just any group structure will suffice. Successful groups have strong rules, strong social boundaries, strong sanctions for disobedience, and strong leadership hierarchies.

I need to think more on this. In a networked insurgent movement like al Qaeda, the way that commitment, obedience and cohesion is maintained is through the movement’s shared narrative. Not sure to what degree this aligns with what Innaccone lays out here.

Picking up on the themes of creating an organizational climate of innovation within the military, there are excellent tie-ins to be found in Chet Richards and Don Vandergriff’s summary of this summer’s Boyd Conference. Not being able to attend the conference in person, I am very grateful for such a readable summation of the day’s discussions.

I hope to be there in person next year…

xkcd nearly always provides an eerily accurate description of my life. It’s my favorite webcomic out there. Full stop.

Today it gives an added bonus as it provides a perfect summary of why you need both a decisionmaker and an analyst to make a good decision…

An important point from Fred Kagan’s piece in the NYTimes magazine last weekend:

McMaster’s own fate has reinforced these apprehensions. President Bush has singled out McMaster’s campaign at Tal Afar as a model of successful strategy. Gen. David Petraeus, now commander of United States forces in Iraq, frequently consults with McMaster in planning his broader counterinsurgency campaign. Yet the Army’s promotion board — the panel of generals that selects which few dozen colonels advance to the rank of brigadier general — has passed over McMaster two years in a row.

McMaster’s nonpromotion has not been widely reported, yet every officer I spoke with knew about it and had pondered its implications. One colonel, who asked not to be identified because he didn’t want to risk his own ambitions, said: “Everyone studies the brigadier-general promotion list like tarot cards — who makes it, who doesn’t. It communicates what qualities are valued and not valued.” A retired Army two-star general, who requested anonymity because he didn’t want to anger his friends on the promotion boards, agreed. “When you turn down a guy like McMaster,” he told me, “that sends a potent message to everybody down the chain. I don’t know, maybe there were good reasons not to promote him. But the message everybody gets is: ‘We’re not interested in rewarding people like him. We’re not interested in rewarding agents of change.’ ”

You get the behavior your reward, and the promotion system simply doesn’t seem to be rewarding the standout stars who have the experience and the intellect to confront the new challenges of the US military’s 21st Century mission. First Hammes, now McMaster.

Tying this back to a post I wrote in the spring, if we’re going to reduce the amount of C2 we need, we need officers able to think creatively and act independently to overcome unstructured problems.

“The crux of the problem in our Army,” Wass de Czege wrote, “is that officers are not systematically taught how to cope with unstructured problems.”

The UN named Maj. Gen. Zhao Jingmin the first Chinese force commander for a UN peacekeeping mission. China’s already the 13th-largest contributor of peacekeepers to the UN, and they’re just getting warmed up. In the past four years, China has increased its peacekeeping contributions by more than an order of magnitude (see Stratfor graphic posted on TPMB’s blog). As this continues, expect to see more of these firsts.

Victor Davis Hanson has an excellent article in City Journal that examines the role and value of military history in education. It deserves to be read in full. Hanson explores how military history became marginalized in mainstream academic study, picking up on some common themes that others have expounded on at length (take, for example, Eliot Cohen’s 2005 op-ed discussing the growing divide between the military and formal academic training).

What lay behind this academic lack of interest? The most obvious explanation: this was the immediate post-Vietnam era. The public perception in the Carter years was that America had lost a war that for moral and practical reasons it should never have fought—a catastrophe, for many in the universities, that it must never repeat. The necessary corrective wasn’t to learn how such wars started, went forward, and were lost. Better to ignore anything that had to do with such odious business in the first place.

Historians of war must derive perverse pleasure, their critics suspect, from reading about carnage and suffering. Why not figure out instead how to outlaw war forever, as if it were not a tragic, nearly inevitable aspect of human existence? Hence the recent surge of “peace studies…”

I’ve noticed during research and visits to graduate program related to military affairs, national security policy and strategy, that what a program calls the study of war says a great deal about its feelings towards military history. Whether one is attempting to end war or simply attempting to understand war, it seems inescapable that one will need to study how wars started in the past, how they were prosecuted and why the results came out as they did. Yet some programs feel the need to bin such studies under the title of “conflict resolution studies” or “peace studies,” while others seem content to merely categorize them as “strategic studies” or “security studies.” Look, for example, at how the International Security Policy concentration at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs takes great pains to diplomatically address this point:

ISP attracts many students interested in the field known elsewhere as Conflict Resolution. The flexible requirements of the concentration make it possible for courses focused on conflict resolution to comprise up to half of the six needed for concentrating in ISP. Many students interested in non-forcible conflict resolution also decide that it is in their interest to get a solid grounding in how force is used in international politics in order to buttress the credibility of their claims, in working environments, to expertise in dealing with conflict.

Apparently, it is less than obvious that a foreign policy, international policy or national security professional needs a solid understanding of how and why groups have and continue to use force. In undergraduate political science seminars, I railed against neo-Rousseauian arguments that in order to spread peace, we simply had to remove the evil structures that had perverted our natural harmony. But that doesn’t meant that I do not appreciate the sentiment that motivates such arguments - as Hanson discusses,

Perhaps what bothers us about wars, though, isn’t just their horrific lethality but also that people choose to wage them—which makes them seem avoidable, unlike a flu virus or a car wreck, and their tolls unduly grievous. Yet military history also reminds us that war sometimes has an eerie utility: as British strategist Basil H. Liddell Hart put it, “War is always a matter of doing evil in the hope that good may come of it.”

But understanding the underlying sentiment does not excuse incorrect assumptions. Mistaken assumptions lead to mistaken policy prescriptions.

Indeed, by ignoring history, the modern age is free to interpret war as a failure of communication, of diplomacy, of talking—as if aggressors don’t know exactly what they’re doing. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, frustrated by the Bush administration’s intransigence in the War on Terror, flew to Syria, hoping to persuade President Assad to stop funding terror in the Middle East. She assumed that Assad’s belligerence resulted from our aloofness and arrogance rather than from his dictatorship’s interest in destroying democracy in Lebanon and Iraq, before such contagious freedom might in fact destroy him. For a therapeutically inclined generation raised on Oprah and Dr. Phil—and not on the letters of William Tecumseh Sherman and William Shirer’s Berlin Diary—problems between states, like those in our personal lives, should be argued about by equally civilized and peaceful rivals, and so solved without resorting to violence.

The first example that sprang to my mind was Donald Kagan’s description of Kennedy’s first meeting with Khrushchev in 1961. Hoping to cut through all the threatening rhetoric and militant posturing, Kennedy attempted to connect to Khrushchev man-to-man. Kennedy had great faith that if he could just get the Soviet premier alone, the two leaders would be able to talk as reasonable men and find common ground upon which to compromise. What Kennedy did not appreciate at the time, however, was that Khrushchev knew he occupied the weaker position and therefore could not compromise - a bluffer must either go for total victory by continuing to raise the stakes, or he must fold and surrender completely. His weak position means that the one course of action he will never take is the middle path of admitting his position and bargaining with the stronger party from a position of weakness.

The long history of war suggests no static primacy of the defensive or the offensive, or of one sort of weapon over the other, but just temporary advantages gained by particular strategies and technologies that go unanswered for a time by less adept adversaries.

This closing reminder is especially important for Americans. Revolutions in military affairs do not solve war, they simply bring about new equilibriums. Like foreign policy, the character of war is better understood as a punctuated equilibrium than as a system searching for a static final state. Kissinger has pointed out (and i’ve discussed before) how this model runs counter to how much of America wants to view foreign affairs. Perhaps the distinction between understanding the dynamics of war and morally endorsing the dynamics of war is too fine. It may be unavoidable that those who seek to connect the goals of peace studies programs with the realities of war will be sometimes treated as ghouls, indulging an immoral appetite for their own macabre pleasure.

The executive summary of the CIA Inspector General’s report on the agency’s pre-9/11 performance contained some nuggets overlooked by most news coverage and partisan bickering. Reading a recent Stratfor analysis (subscription required) made me appreciate how important these nuggets were.

On the third page of the summary sits this bombshell:

The JI concluded that, before 9/11, neither the US Government nor the IC had a comprehensive strategy for combating al-Qa’ida. It charged that the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) was either unwilling or unable to marshal the full range of IC resources necessary to combat the growing threat to the United States. The OIG Team also found that the IC did not have a documented, comprehensive approach to al-Qa’ida and that the DCI did not use all of his authorities in leading the IC’s strategic effort against UBL.

Considering that the fundamental purpose of leadership and directors is to deal with strategic issues, this criticism cuts to the heart of the DCI’s responsibilities. The implicit assumption of claims that subjects are above one’s pay grade is that someone else is addressing the issue. The OIG Team found that in this case, no one was.

While the DCI and DDCI issued warnings and signed memorandums describing the threat posed by UBL and al-Qa’ida, this were not translated into any coherent plan.

The Team found that neither the DCI nor the DDCI followed up these warning and admonitions by created a documented, comprehensive plan to guide the counterterrorism effort at the Intelligence Community level. The DDCI chaired at least one meeting in response to the DCI directive, but the forum soon devolved into one of tactical and operational, rather than strategic, discussions… While CIA and other agencies had individual plans and important initiatives underway, senior officers in the Agency and Community told the Team that no comprehensive strategic plan for the IC to counter UBL was created in response to the DCI’s memoradum, or at any time prior to 9/11.

Memorandums, meetings and forums all fit within the already established bureaucratic processes. They leave copious records for investigations like this to study and provide plenty of fuel for the obscuring smoke screens that spin experts use to escape fundamental issues. All of this, however, doesn’t get us a strategy. Bureaucratic processes need to reflect strategy, but they do not generate strategy.

The DCI may have built a process, but he did not build a strategy for understanding al-Qa’ida, identifying its weaknesses and systematically attacking those weaknesses. Or, to quote directly from the summary,

…the Team concludes that the former DCI, by virtue of his positino, bears the ultimate responsibility for the fact that no such strategic plan was ever created, despite his specific direction that this should be done.

Note the passive voice: a strategic plan should be created. Surely part of the reason why one never was created is due to the fact that no one seemed to believe that it was his or her personal responsibility to create such a strategic plan.

All of this dysfunction reflects the underlying structural problem that faces the intelligence community and the larger national security apparatus of the United States. Bureaucracies do not make strategy, yet for the past fifteen years we have been trusting our strategic re-alignment to a bureaucratic process built around a strategy whose time has passed.

We have no future because our present is too volatile. We only have risk management. The spinning of the given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition.

-William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

Mark, I highly recommend Pattern Recognition. Sure, Neuromancer is influential and everything the Wakoski brothers hoped to create in the Matrix, but Pattern Recognition stunned me due to its exceptional descriptions of the highly volatile and disruptive environment of our 21st Century lives.

I’ve also read All Tomorrow’s Parties, The Difference Engine (co-authored with Bruce Sterling) and just finished Idoru. All Tomorrow’s Parties has some interesting examinations of autonomous zones and their relationship to culture:

‘Alternative subcultures. They were a critical aspect of industrial civilization in the two previous centuries. They were where industrial civilization went to dream. A sort of unconscious R&D, exploring alternative social strategies… But they became extinct.’
‘Extinct?’
‘We started picking them before they could ripen. A certain critical growing period was lost, as marketing evolved and the mechanisms of recommodification became quicker, more rapacious. Authentic subcultures required backwaters, and time, and there are no more backwaters. They went the way of geography in general. Autonomous zones do offer a certain insulation from the monoculture, but they seem not to lend themselves to recommodification, not in the same way.’

I found The Difference Engine to be a delightful introduction to steam punk, but hardly earth-shattering. I enjoyed Idoru, but didn’t encounter any passages that compelled me to underline them.

Ultimately, it is Gibson’s powers of trend identification and cultural forecasting that draws me to his work. He spins out the implications of alternative pathways with internal coherence and immediacy. Pattern Recognition was the work that made me realize this, and therefore if Mark is going to read one more Gibson book, then it ought to be that.

…of course, I haven’t gotten my hands on Spook Country yet, so all of this might be amended…

Packing all of one’s possessions and driving hundreds of miles has a way of impairing the blogging. I’m in the midst of a period of wandering; strategic analysis will come when it’s time.

Old news, but I only just came upon it. Possibly the greatest statement ever issued by a military spokesperson:

We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area.

As if the population of Basra didn’t have enough things to worry about.