UK Defence Position in Iraq: The “Unearthly Ballet of Bloodless Categories”

In 2009, then-US Marine Corps Major and Middle East foreign area officer Ben Connable published a characteristically elegant article in the august journal Military Review in March entitled “All our Eggs in a Broken Basket” regarding the US Army decision to augment sociocultural understanding of brigade combat teams in Iraq and Afghanistan with civilian social scientists, rather than develop an organic expertise within the service components.

I was reminded of that title when reading the House of Commons’ Defence Committee’s critique of UK intelligence on the ground in Iraq. Following on from my previous post here regarding the imprecise, amorphous language of the Army 2020, the dangerously abstract terms in which the UK Defence establishment now couches its analysis renders any understanding of a particular stance, or indeed comprehension of a single direction, impossible.  

I was reminded of Connable’s title because to me the UK Defence reports now try to position no eggs in any baskets at all.

When the philosopher Sir Karl Popper produced his theory of falsification to demarcate the line between science and pseudoscience, he showed that rigorous definition was the key to scientific understanding, that it had to be precise enough, and consequentially testable, such that it could be proved false. In that way, to some degree, science is afforded a direction, built upon a level of concrete rigour.

Consider in opposition to that the UK Defence position in Iraq as outlined by the House of Common’s Defence Committee’s critique on 5 February 2015.

Just as in the problems I outlined in the post below, the same elements recur:

The Committee was shocked by the inability or unwillingness of any of the Service Chiefs to provide a clear, and articulate statement of the UK’s objectives or strategic plan in Iraq. There was a lack of clarity over who owns a policy—and indeed whether such a policy exists.

This again is soldier sorcery: the magic of describing thin and indistinct threats in order to place no eggs in any baskets at all. Perhaps the most telling problem, not for Iraq, but for the general efficacy of UK Defence strategies, was here, also in the summary:

The report recommends that the UK invests heavily in staff to develop a better understanding of the situation on the ground

This, by chance, is a very interesting recommendation, because we might inevitably ask that from a UK force size in-country of 4000 in 2008 in the ongoing Operation Telic (reduced by 1600 from the previous year after the completion of Operation Sinbad in Basra), we find it necessary to suggest in 2015 the heavy investment in human capability.

So what happened? The US example, as the primary foreign agent in Iraq between 2003 and 2009 is instructive. In order to ensure a handover, the surge of forces placed men and materiel on the ground between 2007 and 2009. During that time, remarkable social science research was undertaken on the ground by organic and non-organic elements within, or attached to, the deployed service components.

At least two teams on the ground conducted semi-structured interviews with the Sons of Iraq, the bureaucratic embodiment of the Anbar Awakening, in order to ascertain how the handover of payment from US forces to al-Maliki’s predominantly Shia government should work for them. The results indicated that there was likely to be some significant discrepancy between the reality of the work provisioned for them under Maliki and their expectations having suppressed the AQI surge in the territory.

At that point then in 2009 it would be reasonable to assume that our knowledge of the country was reaching its apogee. But military interest in foreign theatres is ephemeral. With the departure of materiel and manpower, the ability to securely visit all areas of the country ceased. And as Iraq dropped from the foreign affairs radar, the motivation to do in-depth social science research was reduced. Hence both means and motivation effectively ceased.

The British experience in Iraq was more wounding, and hence the motivation to continue research in the theatre was less attractive. In effect, the war could be written off and unlearned. Only, the Maliki government effectively disenfranchised the Sunni minority to the extent that Sunni insurgents were apparently openly greeted when they entered Mosul in June 2014. They came not as oppressors, but as liberators from a corrupt and vicious regime.

From that point forward, the US and Britain have been playing catch up. The spectrum of horrors employed by the Sunni insurgents, all familiarly violent motifs in the annals of war fighting, was rendered visceral, globally-available, and immediate by the use of social media to proliferate and control the message.

Unlike the British experience in Iraq, which effectively unlearned the conflict, for the insurgents in that life or death battle, they necessarily evolved sophisticated platforms to control narratives and finance their operations. This evolution has been borne from harsh assessments of past campaigns and the centre of gravity for insurgent operations (see for example, al-Suri’s Global Islamic Resistance Call for the requirement to control a successful media campaign, and a book from which many elements seem to have been adopted by ISIL).

According to one report, ISIL now controls an area in Iraq and Syria in which there are 15 million civilians, making their own amorphous, indistinct and fragile territorial gain, in terms of population larger than that of Ecuador.

Socio-cultural knowledge is a pre-requisite to successful UK Defence operations. It is relatively inexpensive and requires few personnel. Done well, it can highlight problematic contours such as with the disbanding of the Sons of Iraq, or the leader networks in areas, or inequality, or trajectories of disenfranchisement. Without this capability, we end up with amorphous and meaningless assessments of our positions in countries and when this ephemeral requirement to act returns we are left without understanding of the appropriate manner in which to do so.   

The UK Defence establishment may bemoan recent and anticipated spending cuts, but without a better understanding of the threats faced, and a much more coherent propagation of that message, no political entity will have the motivation to reverse this trajectory of change.

ISIL, or DAESH (al-Dawla al-Islamyia fil Iraq wa’al Sham) to use the on-the-ground name for the Sunni insurgent group (as the UK House of Commons Defence Select Committee did), took UK and US Intelligence by surprise precisely because of that lost human capital on the ground. That is not to say that ground in the race cannot be regained. 

Like any new product, ISIL in control of its new territories is a hostage to the cycle of hype:

As we pass the group’s peak of inflated expectations and civilians experience the deep disillusionment of political control by a religious authority, the opportunity for Iraqi government to regain strong narrative and enfranchised societal gains in order to steal away popular approval of the group from its amorphous territorial gain on the ground must begin. As a brand, it is necessary to take away the group’s appeal.

Unknown Unknowns Muddy Soldier Sorcery of Army 2020 and Defence Committee’s Critique

When trying to get a point across, it helps if you can point at something.

Published today in two volumes, the Commons Defence Committee's critique of Army 2020, 2012 (and Army 2020, Update 2013) in I and II volumes crystallises distinct problems for the Army going forward: uncertain threats (nothing to point to); absence of consultation (creating problems which would have been avoided); difficulty of recruitment the cost of deploying reservists; and, force reduction dictated by economic concerns impacting national security.


Unknown threats are highlighted in Army 2020 stressing an ‘increasingly uncertain future' and the requirement of ‘competing decisively with the full spectrum of competing of potential adversaries’ (meanwhile, the reservists should be integrated into the army within ‘clearly defined roles’). This is horizon scanning. And Horizon scanning isn't sexy, and to prevent being "wrong", it leads to the amorphous indistinct identification which proliferates Army 2020.

The Army should be excoriated for the insertion of these phrases in the Army 2020 documentation:

“conflict is constant and inevitable”

“We don’t choose wars, they pick us.”

No wonder then that the Defence Committee noted that “First, the MoD has failed to communicate the rationale and strategy behind the plan to the Army, the wider Armed Forces, Parliament or the public.”

If you can't point to a Fulda Gap, or a Karbala Gap, then creating a coherent identity is problematic. Without a known threat, however, the identity can still be developed which increases recruitment and develops the Army career path. Increasing civil affairs aspects of the military (as in QDR 2010), will allow Army chiefs to develop scholarly aspects of war fighting capabilities, making the profession more attractive to academic high achievers. As a corollary, this academic symbiosis makes the Ministry of Defence identifiable in the public realm. Rather than sponsoring research through DSTL and Global Uncertainties, a fledgling National Defence Academy can be created, along similar lines to West Point, which has garnered much praise for the creation of the CTC, in response to training deficits apparent in the wake of 9/11.

Army 2020 mentions “language training”, but geographic interest by the military is ephemeral and episodic; culture training is time much better spent, which can also lead to a wide variety of Phase Zero deployments. Lessons learned from Defence Cultural Specialist Unit can be absorbed and used to effect, and collaboration with senior social scientists from the Human Terrain System such as the recently departed Dr Christopher King should be considered. Such developments will augment and clarify elements of the New Career Development Framework.

Regarding reduction, the Army 2020 highlighted force reduction and expansion and integration of reservists (following from the Future Reserves 2020 Review), implementing proposals in the 2010 Strategic Defense and Security Review and developed through the Army’s Three Month Exercise:

“Army 2020 will create an integrated Army of 112,000 personnel by 2020. In order to achieve this, the Army has already begun a programme of redundancies to reduce Regular Army manning levels. Two further tranches of redundancy will be required over the next five years to bring the Army’s Regular strength down to around 82,000 by 2020. The Reserves are currently recruiting to increase their manning levels to a trained strength of 30,000 by 2018.”

Army 2020 lists three amorphous core purposes of the Army: Contingent capability for deterrence and defence; Overseas engagement and capacity building; Civil engagement and homeland resilience. Given the absence of any particular threat, force reduction to proposed levels is not only possible but inevitable. A spectre may haunt the Armed Forces, but it is less a foreign foe and more the global economic landscape.

Fighting insurgencies has severely impacted the Armed Forces. To combat IEDs, technological solutions were developed, such as the MRAP in the US. A programme so costly that it led to a debate in the august journal Foreign Affairs. Snatch Land Rovers are out and Warriors are in, meaning that the trend is for increasingly costly technological enterprises, even against the most technological rudimentary of enemies. The Joint Strike Fighter makes Augustine's Law seem more relevant and more meaningful than satirical as each defence budget arrives. Meanwhile, a logistical problem of long term significance is unfolding in Afghanistan as regards equipment.

The complex wars also exacerbated problems with recruitment; there has been a notable absence of public recognition or clamor for heroism in Iraq and Afghanistan; and Syrian intervention was an important identification of the current public appetite for foreign adventures. As with myriad military adventures of the past, we will salute the immense bravery of the dead, but knowing why they died may be more difficult. In Iraq, security at home was then changed in 2006 to a narrative of securing justice for the Iraqi people. In Afghanistan, both security and justice were developed as narratives simultaneously throughout the later stages of the conflict.

This lack of consultation foregrounded in the Committee's report therefore stems from military performance in impossible conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is exacerbated by hedging in the British military going forward. Are we preparing for a big war in a big war? A small war in the midst of a big war? Smaller wars in small wars? If you don’t know who you are fighting against, you don’t have a coherent idea of self. In such a shadow, training exercises must be interesting, and against a full spectrum of possible threats, there’s relevance in national security for working out how to take down this chap:

After the massacre of Byzantine forces at the battle of Manzikert in 1071, Byzantium itself was never again able to field a sizeable army of its own, but relied heavily on mercenaries. Historical lessons are myriad and clear; economic and human resources dictate responses, after the threat has been identified. Somebody at the MoD should sit down with senior figures and employ a deductive nesting approach to future force configuration. Starting from the top, developing a vision statement which is more than bland aphorisms, it will be necessary to actually leverage expertise and place a lot of eggs in a single basket. That identity will be invaluable for developing and continuing interoperability with the military behemoth (which is currently having exactly the same debate) recruitment, training, teaching, academic and civilian interaction.

“Who are we?” is the question that needs now to be answered.   

Google and a Free Internet

In May 2013 the UK's Shakespeare Review looked at social and economic benefits from the data revolution. The conclusion was that the UK stands at a fork in the road, able to choose between a limited or a chaotic approach to embracing the world of open data. It is true that 2014 will likely be the year of open data, not big data. Wired in the World, 2014 suggests as much. The Syrian insurgents use Twitter to instantly communicate messages, as reported by the Washington Post. The Post makes the distinction between a security-paranoid bin Laden using couriers and flash sticks, to the different generation instantly posting to YouTube and Twitter.

Google has been doing its bit over the past month. In September 2013 Google's IDEAS launched Project Shield, currently invite only, to protect free speech online. Project Shield was launched in conjunction with UProxy, a suite of tools to connect people to the Internet. On the front page, Google notes that 1 in 3 people live in societies where access to the Internet is restricted. Last month the Internet giant also launched an online video university and has launched Coder from Google's Creative Lab to turn the beautiful Rasberry Pi into a web development platform.

Research on Human Terrain System

With US and coalition forces in phased draw-down in Afghanistan, the period in which scholars can first begin to make capped assessments of the Iraq and Afghan theatres is beginning. Within that large sphere of study, the Human Terrain System, which first deployed an Human Terrain Team to Afghanistan in February 2007, merits particular interest because it has bridged academia and the military, thus existing at that historically significant boundary between scholarship and soldiering.

HTTs were deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan in support of Phase Four and Phase Five operations there, working alongside US Army, US Marines and coalition forces. Significant previous studies on the HTTs and the wider programme have been undertaken by authors at Westpoint; the Center for Naval Analyses (as part of a congressionally-directed assessment); and the Institute for Defense Analyses.

A new study conducted by Christopher J. Lamb, James Douglas Orton, Michael C. Davies and Theodore T. Pikulsky at the National Defense University has attempted to answer the question: what accounts for the apparent variation in HTT effectiveness? In answering, the authors have conducted interviews with approximately 100 former or serving HTS personnel and brigade staff, going further than previous studies and charting the historical trajectory of the programme in hitherto unseen depth.

At the same time, the journalist Vanessa Gezari has published an account of the Human Terrain System, also drawing on a considerable range of interviews with key members of the programme. This journalistic account centres upon the story of Paula Loyd and Don Ayala in Afghanistan whilst placing it within a wider critique of the programme.

Centring on the NDU study, an article critical of the HTTs was penned recently by Gian Gentile. A detailed response was published by one of the NDU authors, Michael Davies, which rebuts Gentile's argument point by point.

Broadly, the continued interest which HTS holds for stakeholders is due to the unresolved notion of academic assistance to the military structure: Can it help or hinder? How can it help? How has this relationship developed through history? What does HTS mean for the future direction of social science approaches to warfighting more generally? Is this future direction a "good" or a "bad" thing for the United States military and partner forces?

One of the more interesting developments from the HTS architecture in the future may be the trajectories of those former HTT members as they continue in their careers - possessing a mixture of academic expertise, area specialty - and because of their participation in HTTs, having enhanced, invaluable authority from their experiences downrange in Phase 4 and Phase 5 operations - these individuals will offer the US government remarkable insight into future threats and planning, legitimated by scholastic intellect coupled to warzone experience. In combining these two prized commodities, some may come to influence the future direction of US foreign policy and in so doing, inevitably fuse at some intersections the spheres of social sciences and the military.
 

Stone software and Open Sourced global libraries

I'm online, therefore I am.

Piece in the Guardian about the open-source data used by Stone software developed at the University of Maryland to predict the organizational restructuring of terrorist groups. The arc of history may be long but ultimately it tends towards open-sourced information and that means that that data is pushed from the government to the public domain. There may be a current furore over the NSA procedures (and the slightly more unofficial applications) but the social media investigation of the Boston marathon bombing, complex and rumour-driven, points to new directions in which data is aggregated. Rolling newsfeeds are now largely driven by combing social media for information, and alive to the exabytes of information stored across all social media datasets, companies are designing software to create rapid composites of such data across different platforms to generate usable information on individuals and groups. One of the foremost projects is Raytheon's Rapid Information Overlay Technology. It's an acronym bound to travel quickly in social media when its use is first documented.  Perhaps that is why the Snowden revelations were apparently so damaging - it's a fast-paced battle between public expansion and government retention of information in which the NSA had obviously circumvented certain rules in order to stay a step ahead and moreover, the extent to which it has embraced Big Data has been met with surprise. Not that the NSA has ever shied away from Big Data, but the Internet now makes that dataset orders of magnitude larger. We are all thinking open source now - from Westpoint to Martha Crenshaw at Stanford the datasets are available, and the ways in which we leverage that data will continue to be one of the most important issues of our time and one in which precision is often in tension with accuracy. Still, the gselevator Twitter feed tweets the whole thing best: "Only idiots get bored when we've all got handheld devices containing infinite knowledge at our fingertips."

The Future of Insurgency?

Seth G. Jones Patrick B. Johnston (2013) 'The Future of Insurgency', Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 36(1), pp. 1-25

Comprehensive overview of the likely trajectory of insurgencies from RAND (Jones and Johnston) and hence, having characterised the nature of such conflict, the scholarly stage is set for further writing on how best to orientate Western forces to combat such threats.

Interesting for

(1) The quantitative assessment of the Afghan insurgency/counterinsurgency forces:

"In early 2012, there were approximately 432,000 counterinsurgent forces in Afghanistan—90,000 U.S. soldiers, 30,000 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) soldiers, 300,000 Afghan National Security Forces, and 12,000 Afghan Local Police.1 In addition, the United States spent over $100 billion per year and deployed a range of sophisticated platforms and systems to support efforts against the Taliban and its allies. The Taliban, on the other hand, deployed between 20,000 and 40,000 forces (a ratio of nearly 11 to 1 in favor of counterinsurgents) and had revenues of roughly $100–$200 million per year (a ratio of
500 to 1 in favor of counterinsurgents)"

And

(2) For the spectre of a threat of news wars - synonymous with those envisaged in the 1960s after the failure of the Paris summit and Kruschev's support for wars of national liberations - in peripheral regions sponsored by China (instead of Russia) in order to safeguard interests (supporting "proxies, p. 14, see also Christopher Sims, 'Fighting the Insurgents' War in Afghanistan', Small Wars Journal, 2012). The Chinese involvement in Africa has largely been viewed in the Western media as part of a resource grab which will pit it eventually against the West because of a clash of interests. Yet certain deep investigations have revealed a synergic  partnership between African workers and the Chinese investors, which is slowly spurring developments in the region. In parallel, there has been significant funding from Chinese entities on improving Africa infrastructure, which whilst primarily to ease Chinese work in the region, also spurs domestic industry and transport.

MERLN - Cybersecurity

The National Defense University's impeccable Military Education Research Library Network has added a cybersecurity page. As well as general scholarly articles, this page also collates international policy papers on cybersecurity. Here is the Tallinn Manual, created to order thoughts on how international norms may apply to cyberconflict.

Occidentalism at War

Other Modernities, an open-access journal at the University of Milan kindly published an article, Occidentalism at War: Al-Qaida's Resistance Rhetoric as part of their special edition on Orientalism and Occidentalism.

Hamas in context

Important perspective on  حركة المقاومة الاسلامية and Israel dynamic (here's the Iranian interest); provides a welcome context on the recent conflict, embeds it within a detailed historical trajectory and gives an expert analysis of the Hamas leadership.

Virtual academies

As mobile phone networks expand in Afghanistan and hence mobile phone usage increases, al-Arabiya and the World Service have run a story on a collaboration between teachers in the country and US interests, of which the United States government provided funds. It is a mobile phone called Ustad Mobile (Mobile Teacher). Distributed free to students the phones contain audo-visual lessons on writing, pronunciation and phrases. Women have largely been denied the right to education under the restrictive policies of the incumbent Taliban rule from the middle of the 90s until their fall in 2001. Since then, war has once again ravaged the country, making education less of a priority than security.

Mobile Teacher was developed by an Afghan company Paiwastoon, with US$80 000 of United States aid. The current literacy rate is 12.5 percent for Afghan women, compared with 39.3 percent for Afghan men.

The company managed Nicholas Negraponte's One Laptop One Child programme, in distributing 3000 laptops to women and children in Afghanistan. But mobiles are seen as better - they are cheaper, more mobile, and people are familiar with their operating protocols.

Education is fundamental to the propagation not just of society, but the human race. It is a lofty consideration. We must spend serious time considering the nature of education, its trajectory and what we want it to be for future generations. Perhaps the single greatest loss for mankind was the burning of the library at Alexandria. No-one is quite sure who is to blame. We can never know the loss of such a body of knowledge from antiquity. Often in the surviving classical literature, names and books are referenced which are no longer known to us. Even specific titles evoke our interest today to such an extent that a book and film are made of tomes whose content we can only speculate about. (in this instance, Aristotle's lost volume of Poetics). Such was the dangerous nature of the knowledge therein that the book was hidden in an elaborate maze within a tower.

Perhaps it is not knowledge which is dangerous but instead the limiting of its proliferation. It is an uneasy concept - allowing the global spread of knowledge untrammeled would for example, see Waltz's hypothesis tested that a nuclear Iran would be a safe prospect. But untrammeled, knowledge would lead to greater understanding. The CTC at West Point has made much of al-Qaeda's primary source material available, translated, online. The result has been greater understanding and innoculation rather than a proliferation of English speaking jihadists.

We must consider the nature of online teaching, which is expanding at a great rate. Below are YouTube clips from leading online teaching resources.

Khan Academy (TED talk)





Coursera


EdX


MIT Media Lab

The Future

The future of teaching, if not learning, is the virtual environment. Learning for the foreseeable future may still take place in the classroom but it is not a stretch to see the virtual sphere take over the learning aspects as well as the teaching aspects. Quite what this would entail for the traditional model of paid physical attendance is open to debate but it would in theory place greater emphasis on research as a means to achieve funding. Or, if teaching was available free online, learning would be on a pay-per-submission basis. The Internet is changing the way knowledge diffuses. My niece can now watch the philosophy lectures of Michael Sandel at Harvard whilst in a hotel in Mumbai, a beach in Thailand, a cafe in Paris; course reading lists are occasionally available free-to-view online, meaning that she can, still in Mumbai, read the necessary works and get podcasts of lectures, pdfs or ppts of lecture handouts.

When Victor Frankenstein created a female partner for his male creation, he had to journey across Europe to London with all of his laboratory equipment, in order to consult with the professors in the city who alone possessed the necessary expertise to ensure his success. The length of his time abroad was of such consternation to his sweetheart that she grew angry at the prospect. Today, Victor Frankenstein would flick a switch on his Macbook and Skype with the academics in between breakfast and lunch. No equipment had to be moved, no time abroad considered.

The information flow is not yet fully virtual. Physical movements are still necessary. Over 36 000 Chinese students are in Higher Education establishments in the UK. But this is learning as much as teaching - studying abroad is not solely about excellence in teaching but also about learning - languages, cultural expertise. The virtual academy, as Negroponte notes, is still a teaching tool and not yet a learning one.  

The Anon's Low Orbit Ion Cannon

One of the interesting elements from the "Anonymous: We are Legion" documentary was the Anon's use of the DDOS software Low Orbit Ion Cannon which included the user's Internet Service Provider address in the multiple ISP addresses which denied service to the targeted websites. The software was developed by Praetox technologies but is now open source, hosted on several platforms.

LOIC was used as part of Project Chanology, when Anonymous as a movement emerged, in their actions against the Church of Scientology. The LOIC was used additionally in Operation Payback, in response to organizations' refusals to process donations to WikiLeaks.

That the LOIC logged the user's own IP meant that the perpetrators of the DDOS attacks could be easily identified by the FBI which led to a series of arrests. It brought home the virtual to that of reality and shifted the balance in favour of the authorities because Anon's actions had real life consequences, and as the first wave of perpetrators, it is possible that sentences handed down will be severe in order to deter further and more creative acts against organizations and governments. Some of the offenders are faced with maximum Federal punishments of 15-year jail sentences.

Anons have attacked the Church of Scientology, Mastercard, Visa, government websites amongst other entities and recently had a publicised fall out with WikiLeaks over its pay-per-view bar on new material, which was subsequently taken down. The political character of such a disparate movement is necessarily diffuse and hence the message becomes muddied. Anonymous have released a video decrying Obama's record but with a lack of viable alternatives. Criticism is one thing but offering solutions is something else entirely, and is the necessary next phase of a manifesto.

Hacktivism

Given the recent claim by Anonymous that they have outed the internet stalker of Amanda Todd, here's a brilliant documentary on the hacktivist collection.

NYT interactive timeline of Persia and US relations

Interactive timeline from the New York Times

Final report of the Iran Project on the character military conflict with Iran might assume.

Biddle, Friedman, Shapiro on The Surge

It's controversial, and arguments about it have spilled out on such sites as Kings of War, Line of Departure and Small Wars Journal, so it's worth commenting on when the august journal International Security leads with "Testing the Surge: Why Did Violence Decline in Iraq in 2007?"

The narrative is by now familiar. From 2004 to mid 2007 Iraq was violent, then it became relatively calm. Relative calm is just that, relative. The authors do well to note that Iraq today "is no Garden of Eden". Operational execution of suicide bombing has increased in proficiency to the extent that detonations now invariably cause deaths between 50-100 people in the country. Police stations are still highly desirable targets.

So what of the surge? It draws argument because of the concatenation of circumstances and the various narratives at play. It was the start of population-centric coin en masse; FM 3-24 had been published in December 2006. So COIN doctrine was necessarily foregrounded in US policy circles as having reduced violence from 2007 onwards.

David H. Ucko wrote an article in PRISM, the NDU's journal in which he considered factors at play in the reduction of violence in Iraq in 2007, but this new article by Biddle et alia is by far the most comprehensive examination of the matter using declassified Significant Activity charts (SIGACTs) to provide a quantitative aspect to the analysis.

The conclusion? Quite mainstream. The surge itself is an insufficient explanation as to the violence reduction witnessed, rather it remains the most likely answer that it was a dynamic between the Awakening of tribal units coupled with the increase in manpower afforded the US military on the ground. Indeed, as regards academic debate on the influence of the surge, Biddle et alia decide that "Our analysis, however, suggests a mixed verdict." Which points to the problem of human variables and the insufficiency of current quantitative analysis to examine such variables. We can only try and Biddle at alia's article is the best attempt yet to assess the surge.

Leon Panetta on Syria (2mins)

Courtesy of The Daily Telegraph.

12 months in the life of a phosphate-mining stock

If phosphorus is the next major-power resource war then phosphate mining stocks will see a considerable rise in their value across a given time period from this point hence. Thus I will choose four phosphate-mining company stocks and I plan to evaluate their price and their trajectory in approximately twelve months hence. This goes against current market opinion that suggests stocks are a sell after a period of stagnant potash prices. Also, if you've been following the blog, the last post noted the existence of Gaussian distributions in modelling, see here also the Hubbert peak theory as a Gaussian distribution. Some commentators have applied it to phosphate prices, hence expecting a sharp fall over the coming year.


Put simply, I am arguing that war is the continuation of economics by other means. 

1. The Mosaic Company (Current 55)

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2. Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan inc. (Current 43.78)

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3. Intrepid Potash (Current 23.58)

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4. Allana Potash Corp (Current 0.55)

The End of Order and the Last Online Gamer

A few years back an American friend of mine who was a student of ancient history, in particular the Roman Empire, wanted me to play Civilization II, an online turn-based game. She told me that it was her wish to flirt with, and then conquer, some of the greatest leaders of the ancient world. When I probed further, she named Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan. She said that the only way to rule the world with decency was to take over all of it and rule as a benevolent dictator. Incidentally, she was a varsity cheerleader and a big fan of Peter Heather. Which reminds me that I've been meaning to pop to Prof. Heather's department and get him to sign a book for her, and then I'll post it. Two of her other heroes were Plato and also Pink.

Anyway, huffingtonpost.co.uk had a story this week and it makes good reading for individuals involved in the military-industrial complex and indeed, proponents of maintaining armoured divisions in the face of no known threats. One man has been playing CivsII for ten years. He's got to 4000A.D. and well, it's a state of never-ending war. Only three civs are left, Vikings, Celts, Americans (hardy fellows, each). They've been in a state of perpetual war for 1700 years. Yes, I'm sure I just heard Martin Dempsey's heart skip a beat.

The player wanted his America to remain a democracy but could only control it through (I presume Stalin-esque) communism. Wars were nuclear and continually fought for control over resources. In 4000A.D., most of his money went on tanks. Tanks.

The story went viral. Even Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder commented on it. The plan now is to take over the entire world and act as a benevolent dictator. 'Democracy had failed' one user posted. Quite. There are some pertinent issues here - nuclear war, resource war, unstable political systems and perpetual war. These themes are constant in the news, no wonder the story went viral, in 4027 A.D., the user is engaged in a scenario that's a plausible, real future.

It makes you think. I just blogged on Phosphorus as the next big power conflict. It makes me ask, when would you use nuclear weapons? If you look at Cuba, generally regarded as the closest two nuclear powers have come to launching nuclear strikes, the necessity to launch a nuclear strike wasn't there. Robert McNamara in the incredible documentary/interview Fog of War, makes it known that the US saw that if the Soviets could climb down whilst saving face, there was a way out.

Resource war makes a climbdown unthinkable. If your population is starving and hence rebelling, you have to go to war against an external other in order to secure resources. In short, both you and your population not only want, but need, a nuclear strike.

How soon? Look at a population growth chart from 10, 000 B.C. to 2000 A.D.

Here's a shorter time period, 1750 A.D. (1 billion) to 2050 A.D. (10 billion). The Civ player noted the world population peaked in 2000 A.D and then fell sharply due to war and famine.

In fact, the second graph is very much the first half of a Gaussian function, or normal distribution - a bell shaped curve found in many aspects of nature. Which makes the Civ II model even more pertinent. What does this mean for Academia? If Huntington's Clash of Civ's thesis was the debated argument of the first decade of this century, it seems that Garrett Hardin's Lifeboat ethics will be the debate of the next decade.

Nuclear weapons, resource poverty, unstable political systems. Makes you wish for a varsity cheerleader who's happy to act as a benevolent global dictator.

The BBC did a little piece on the Civ story, here.

Animated Foucault and Deleuze in conversation

Love this. YouTube animation of the infamous conversation between Deleuze and Foucault from 1972 included in Bouchard ed. (1977). The "Comments" aren't your usual YouTube fare.

Phosphorus: The Next Big Power Conflict

There's a scene in Alan Moore's famous comic book (he resented the term 'graphic novel') between the Batman and the Joker, in the rain, at a deserted funfair. The Joker is walking around and he says:

"Do you know what triggered the last World War? An argument over how many telegraph poles Germany owed its war debt creditors!'

The joke is on us. National provisions for populations means safeguarding citizens right to consumerism will create resource conflicts around minerals necessary for foodstuffs. Crazy.

The historical accuracy aside, seemingly small controversies can escalate provided there is enough momentum already gained between the antagonists. Simply put, even telegraph poles can be the straw that caused the camel to go to war.

Phosphorus is critical to phosphate fertilisers, themselves critical to 'global food security' says The London Times in a feature on food miracles (a great summary of the problem and history is here at Business Insider). The richest supplies are in Morocco and China and the latter is now less eager to export it than it used to be. Moreover, that 'India is already almost one hundred percent dependent on imported phosphorus' shows the possible antagonisms that could arise over access to minerals.

China has a plan. The plan is to secure resource access globally. To safeguard resource access, it will develop its military, in order to combat US military hegemonic status, should the US confront it over resources. The United States may assume that China is developing its military in order to assert regional authority but it is something much more precise: China understands that the rise of the Asian populations and their consumerism will lead to turbulence in terms of resource access. Whilst America has spent the last ten years engaged in military confrontation to ensure physical security, China has been engaged in soft power offensives aimed at resource security.

The idea is simple: secure resources for your population and your nation survives. Given the nuclear status of China, conflicts will only erupt at the local level, hence China needs high end military technology and cyberintelligence.

China is already resource wealthy. It possesses supplies of most minerals necessary for US manufacturing, for example. C. Robert Taylor argues that US domestic phosphorus supplies will be exhausted in 15-30 years and that this resource, not oil, will then be the key security factor in US foreign policy. Taylor notes that:


Morocco and China hold 60 percent of the world’s known phosphorus reserves while the U.S., South Africa and Jordan hold most of the rest.
Wisely, China, “has imposed a 100 to 175 percent tariff to curtail phosphorus exports, yet the U.S. continues to export to China. Troubling, ain’t it 

Food is key. The reason is obvious. You don't have to kill to survive. You don't have to consume luxury goods to survive. You don't have to have three foreign vacations a year to survive. You don't need to upgrade your home entertainment system to survive or even buy Homeland Series 1 on DVD boxset to survive. But you do have to eat. And if you think that's far fetched, look at what happened to global markets in April 2012 when the cost of Spring Onions and Cabbages in China soared.

Cry Havoc, and let loose the forces of Anonymous

Of course, it makes good sense.Some individuals or groups are collaborating as Anonymous and hacking sites containing sensitive data. Earlier this month it launched DDoS attacks against the UK Home Office's website.

So of course, it makes sense. Earlier this month Anonymous launched attacks against Chinese sites. Its "Anonymous China" twitter feed proclaimed, "Dear Chinese government, you are not infallible." And provided those who accessed it information on anti-censorship programmes.

So of course it makes sense. The American government has been the main target of Anonymous so its important to stress a new, more malicious enemy.

So of course, it makes sense. China's hunger for corporate espionage is harming America, claimed Richard Falkenrath, Former Deputy Homeland Security Advisor to the White House. Right wing conspiracy theorists see the RQ-170 drone lost over Iran as being brought down by a Chinese cyberunit, or more generally, just the Chinese.

So of course it make sense. Adam Segal, writing April 20, 2012 in Foreign Policy, argues Anonymous should attack five key Chinese websites. It's not us, it's them, is Segal's tone - China has the really good secrets.