Cyber War, Future War, Long Reads, Tactical Concepts

Not Like Yesterday: David Kilcullen’s Out of the Mountains

November 1, 2013 Guest Author 2 Comments

…and into the Littorals

In a 1997 speech to the National Press Club that will be familiar to many Navy and Marine Officers, General Charles Krulak, 31^st Commandant of the Marine Corps, told the story of Roman consul Publius Varus. Consul Varus was a once successful general whose legions were decimated by Germanic tribes using what we might refer to as asymmetric tactics that left the Roman’s flummoxed. Varus’ last words were recounted as “Ne Cras, Ne Cras,” or “Not like yesterday.” The story presents a challenge to military leaders in our own generation to refrain from getting complacent in their own capabilities, and to continue to adapt their organizations to meet new and unexpected threats.

General Krulak’s went on to introduce the concept of an urban “three block war,” in which combat forces would simultaneously conduct humanitarian relief, peacekeeping, and high intensity combat operations in the space of three contiguous blocks of a complex urban environment. In many ways General Krulak’s words were more prophetic than he could know, as within six years U.S. forces were engaged against an irregular enemy in complex, densely populated urban terrain in Iraq.

American combat troops out of Iraq and on the cusp of departing Afghanistan. This makes it the perfect opportunity to examine old ideas about urban warfare with fresh eyes and look for both the continuities and the differences resulting from a globally connected world and the proliferation of advanced weapons and technologies down to the sub-state level.

Dr. David Kilcullen, an Australian soldier and counterinsurgency specialist who advised U.S. leadership on strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan, has taken a major step in this direction with his new book Out of the Mountains. Kilcullen’s new work analyses the major trends driving the future of conflict around the world. His findings will indeed have far reaching implications for the U.S. military, which has been focused for years on a rural insurgency based in the mountains and deserts of Afghanistan. Conflict will not be as it was yesterday. It will be fought in major coastal urban centers amidst tens of millions of people, and it will span all domains including land, sea, air, and cyber. These conflicts will be complex and will almost never have a purely or even primarily military solution, but their intensity will at the very least require military force to protect and enable other forms of power and influence as they are applied in support of U.S. strategic goals. The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps will need to be adaptable and flexible in order to remain mission-capable in such an environment.

This article will examine the major trends that Kilcullen identifies, and attempt to delve deploy into their military implications. Dr. Kilcullen identifies four “mega-trends” that are shaping the future of humanity, and with it the future of warfare as a human endeavor. These trends include:

Increasing Population – The U.N. estimates that the global population will continue to increase, especially in developing nations, before leveling off around 9 billion people sometime in the latter half of the century.
Urbanization – For the first time in human history, more than half of the population worldwide lives in cities.
Littoralization – Most cities, and certainly the largest ones, are in coastal zones that provide access to seaborne transportation and thus access to the global economy. Kilcullen usefully defines the littorals as the portion of land and air that can be targeted by weapons from the sea, and likewise that portion of sea and air that can be targeted from land.
Digital Connectedness – Internet and mobile phone access are beginning to saturate markets worldwide, and in some countries access to communications technology outstrips access to sanitation facilities.

The first three of these trends are not news. Kilcullen notes that sociologists have been writing about population and urbanization for decades, and urban conflict was a major focus of military thinking in the 1990s. However, the acceleration of these trends, combined with the burgeoning level of digital connectedness not widely foreseen in the 1990s, means that urban conflicts will take on a new level of violence and intensity that will be broadcast around the world instantaneously. This will provide our adversaries with powerful commercial tools to enable command and control (C2) of independent networked cells in a dynamic battlespace.

At the operational level, planners can expect warfare to range from the multiple-battalion level assault on Fallujah at the high-end to complex “urban seige” attacks such as Mumbai and Nairobi in the mid-range to the persistent urban violence of the drug wars in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas at the low-end. In each instance, the enemy will be a small, networked, and extremely well-armed group. It will reside in a sea of millions of civilians and be able to call upon commercial digital networks from cell phones to Twitter to collect intelligence, post propaganda, and act as ad hoc C2 nodes to coordinate operations. It will also be able to draw on a massive global transportation system to transport people, weapons, and finances around the world in short order.

In order to flesh out the capabilities of modern networked urban terrorist groups, Kilcullen analyzes in detail the 2008 Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) Mumbai assault. LeT’s ground-breaking tactics, which displayed a level of free-flowing swarming ability that is at the very least rare for a sub-state actor, are worth examining. The attack was carried out by multiple cells of just a few individuals each who had conducted a thorough reconnaissance of their targets for nearly a year. The attackers used maritime ratlines normally employed by smugglers to move from Karachi to the port of Mumbai, making landfall in a slum neighborhood with little police presence. Once the assault began, their actions were coordinated via cell- and satellite-phone by a LeT command team operating their own combat operations center in Pakistan (likely with some support from Pakistani ISI). The team used broadcasts from CNN and other media networks to inform their battle tracking and develop an open-sourced understanding of the Indian police response. This allowed the LeT cells to remain several steps ahead of Indian security forces for several days, killing civilians at several high-profile public locations around Mumbai before they were finally surrounded and neutralized.

Digital connectedness is also allowing insurgent groups to expand their presence into the global information space that was once the sole purview of states and large corporations. Regular readers of this blog will likely remember that al-Shabaab live-tweeted the recent Navy SEAL raid in Barawe, and after the special operators withdrew, were able to claim victory before Western news outlets even knew the operation had taken place. The militants then followed up by posting pictures of equipment that the SEALs had left behind during their extraction from the firefight. While seemingly trivial, this allowed al Shabaab to stake its claim to the information available on the attack, and perhaps shatter some of the aura of invincibility surrounding the SEALs since their assault on Osama bin Laden and rescue of Captain Richard Philips from Somali pirates.

It is beyond the scope of a single blog post to analyze all of the future trends that Kilcullen examines in detail. Indeed, the book itself is likely just the first of a great deal of research that still needs to be done on the future of urban conflict against evolved irregular or hybrid adversaries in mega-slums and other dense and highly complex urban environments. Much of that research will, of necessity, have to focus on non-military aspects of conflict prevention and mitigation, due to the unavoidable fact that future urban conflicts will be driven by sociological factors inherent to the urban systems where they are being fought. Under Kilcullen’s formulation, urban design and development will in many ways become as important to American policy as foreign aid, governance and economic development, and security sector reform.

The implications for military doctrine and organization will be significant as well. It will impact Naval doctrine, organization, and ship-building plans even as Navy leadership seeks to focus its efforts and budgetary priorities towards AirSea Battle. The same is true for the Marine Corps’ efforts to reposition itself as the nation’s amphibious crisis response force following a decade of warfare in landlocked environments. In following articles, we will examine these implications in depth, and attempt to achieve a better degree of resolution on the future of urban littoral combat and the steps that the Navy and Marine Corps will need to take to remain mission-capable in that environment.

Dan Dewit is a researcher with the Arleigh Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. From 2009- September, 2013 he served as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps.

History, Strategic Outlook

The Rise of the Social-State

October 31, 2013 Guest Author 2 Comments

As the clock struck midnight on December 31, 2000, at the start of a new millennium, there were approximately 360 million unique internet users. Just 1/1000th of the populations in the Middle East and Africa had access to the internet. Facebook was still but a twinkle in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye.

Thirteen years later, this has changed dramatically. At nearly 2.5 billion people, the internet is used by more than 1/3 of the world’s population. More than 15% of Africans now have access to the internet – the majority of them getting it through mobile data via cell phones – while a whopping 40% of Middle Easterners are now online. That represents a growth of over 3000% (that’s three thousand) in just over a decade.

At the same time, social media use has risen exponentially. If all the Facebook users in the world were assembled into one place, they would make up the third-largest country on Earth with over 1.1 billion citizens (behind only China and India). While not nearly as numerous, there are over 500 million users of 140-character Twitter, with over 10% of those people in a single country: China.

A Different World

You forgot the "@" before Mubarak. — You forgot the “@” before Mubarak.

People are no longer left to rely on the state-sponsored dictation of events, or even a few media outlets reporting what they’ve seen. With Twitter, first-hand accounts and pictures can be passed quickly; with Facebook, users can share and collaborate on growing trends; on YouTube, we can see with our own eyes exactly what is happening in Syria, Egypt, or on the streets outside Washington, DC.

The most enduring reality of the past decade has been the rise of the global individual. In 2006, Time‘s “Person of the Year” was the individual (“You,” to be specific). In response to old, slow, unresponsive regimes in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and a host of other countries, leaders were either deposed in a violent way or forced to make significant concessions antithetical to the totalitarian norm.

Global individualism has led to a prioritization of individuals and ideologues over the traditional concept of “nation.” When you can “like” the Syrian Free Army on Facebook or “follow” al-Shabaab on Twitter from the comfort of your own home, it doesn’t matter that you live in the land known as “Pakistan” or “Egypt” or even “the United States of America.” Individuals across the globe are organizing themselves more now by ideas and preferences than by borders or nationality.

This notion is not new in religious lore. In Islam, the organization of Muslims everywhere is known as the “Caliphate.” Before it was a UN-recognized state, Israel was the name of the global community of Jewish people. Today, we might call all fans of the Dallas Cowboys a “Facebook group” and all the internet subscribers of Muqtada al-Sadr his “Twitter followers.” In the 21^st century, the diaspora is connected via wi-fi.

The Decline of Nationalism

At a recent gathering of more than 150 American citizens with at least some level of college education, I asked the assembled crowd to identify the corporate logos of Starbucks, Shell, AT&T, McDonald’s, and Fed Ex. 100% of the crowd was able to correctly identify at least 4 of the logos, while around 90% were able to identify all 5.

Immediately afterward, I asked the same 150 people to identify the national flags of Syria, Egypt, Somalia, Libya, and Chad. Approximately 80% could identify 1 flag, 60% could identify 2 flags, 33% could identify 3 flags, 10% could identify 4 flags, and only 1 person (an African studies major in college) could identify all 5 flags.

In an effort to drive the point home, I flashed the flags of five U.S. states: New York, Alabama, Delaware, Indiana, and Massachusetts. If you can believe it, the percentages were actually worse; not a single person was able to correctly identify all five state flags (to be honest, if I hadn’t researched for the event, I doubt I would have been able to guess more than three or four either).

This erudite experiment, though anecdotal and far from scientific, points to a larger global trend: the decline of nationalism, and the rise of global individualism.

The Ideological Basis of Armies

In light of the recent revolutions that comprised “the Arab Spring,” one must ask: how are armies fielded? In our textbooks, we are taught that armies are the property of nation-states, who field them in defense of their borders or broader national interests.

But isn’t the original concept of the nation-state simply an ideal? At its basic level, an army is stood by people coming together to protect themselves from harm by a common enemy. It follows, then, that the armies of the 21^st century will follow this natural law—that they are fielded to defend ideals—and with that comes a monumental shift in the global political paradigm: the rise of the social-state.

This is not a new idea. In his book Jihad Joe, J.M. Berger estimates that more than 1,400 American citizens have taken part in some form of militant jihad over the past 30 years. As our communication and connectivity brings us closer, our money and internet history drive our future more than the votes we drop in the ballot box.

Yet simple connectivity cannot supplant real action from Internet users. In “Tweeting Toward Freedom,” the Wilson Quarterly noted that, “More than a million people have joined a Facebook page of the Save Darfur Coalition, but few among them have taken any additional action to help those in Sudan.” The most effective ideologues in this century will be those who can turn words on a computer screen into reliable action from their followers.

The Social State

In a Small Wars Journal article, Richard Lindsey wrote, “There comes a point in any insurgency where it must move beyond the reach of social media, and tangible gains must be made on the ground – positions occupied, personalities deposed, systems replaced, logistics realized, and governments overthrown.” Yet if insurgents and individuals can defend themselves from governments while operating within that government’s borders, they have already made “tangible gains…on the ground.” The positions, personalities, systems, logistics, and governance are provided through wireless or ether connections and supported via the “social compact”—namely, some form of user agreement.

If I can get access to the internet, I can pledge to a cause, fund that cause, and become indoctrinated to that cause. We might call this process “assimilation.” My physical location is only important insomuch as I can carry out actions for that cause in my specific locale or travel to a nearby location to do the same. The “social-states” created by this reality are the future of the world, where citizens are arranged by borders of thought, ideology, and preference.

On its face, this may seem like a unique solution to so many conflicts throughout the world. However, the “borders” created by such a reality are much more fluid, volatile, and confusing, and they will drive our concept of conflict. In the book Warrior Politics, visionary author Robert Kaplan surmises that “the spread of information in the coming decades will lead not just to new social compacts, but to new divisions as people discover new and complex issues over which to disagree.”

Rather than access to weapons and land, the ability to control the electromagnetic spectrum and access to the internet will define future battlefields as the “strategic high ground.” Cyber strike and defense will be the most critical mission sets as friend and foe alike use this medium to achieve not only kinetic effects against their enemies–including CBRNE—but important non-kinetic effects as well, especially those encompassed in the concept of Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2AD).

Without respect for nation-state political borders, these effects will be felt indiscriminately by both supporters and opponents of the cause. Therefore, those who can develop the ability to discriminate their effects will find the most success and support.

The Tough Sell

A new global paradigm isn’t limited to the shores of Africa or the Middle East; it can be seen here in America. The government shutdown is a case study in the inability of governments to respond to large-scale discord in a way that maintains credibility – and in this century, credibility and confidence is currency. Those who cannot control the 24/7 opinion and social media reality will quickly cede their control to the growing social-state underneath.

Therefore, it will be in the best interests of major nations like the USA, China, Germany, United Kingdom, and France, among others, to counter these tendencies and find a way to “sell” the nation-state in a 21st century marked by individual power. More than Nazism, fascism, or communism, the synergistic effects of non-state actors, insurgents, and individuals through social media and collaboration will be the greatest existential threat to freedom as we know it—the kind of freedom nation-states enjoy—that the world has ever witnessed.

In his New York Times piece “The End of the Nation-State?” Parag Khanna reminds us that “[t]his isn’t to say that states have disappeared, or will. But they are becoming just one form of governance among many.” In an age where information and products consume our daily routines, nation-states are faced with a very tough sell, indeed. There are many questions that partisans, policy makers, and populations must answer: Is the nation-state worth fighting for, or is the social-state a better alternative? Are the two mutually exclusive? Is the paradigm shift inevitable?

We will shape the answers to these questions over the coming decades. In the meantime, the only certainty seems to be that we will be uncertain.

LT Roger L. Misso is a Naval Flight Officer (NFO) in the E-2C Hawkeye, recent MAWTS-1 WTI graduate, and former director of the Naval Academy Foreign Affairs Conference (NAFAC). The opinions and views expressed in this post are his alone and are presented in his personal capacity. They do not necessarily represent the views of U.S. Department of Defense or the U.S. Navy.

Current Operations

Over at USNI – Nigerian Piracy in Context

October 30, 2013 Guest Author Leave a comment

Editor’s Note: CIMSECian James Bridger has a good piece up at USNI’s News and Analysis site debunking some of the myths of the “rise” in Gulf of Guinea piracy and placing the latest incidents, including the kidnapping of two American mariners on Oct 23rd in their proper context. Check it out here:

Kidnapped Americans in Context: The Shifting Forms of Nigerian Piracy

*C-Escort, owned by Edison Chouest Offshore of Cut Off, La., is a sistership to the C-Retriever. American crew from the C-Retriever were kidnapped by Nigerian pirates on Oct. 23, 2013.*

Future Tech

Game-Changers: Two Views on CNAS Disruptive Tech Report

October 29, 2013 Guest Author 1 Comment

By Scott Cheney Peters and Przemyslaw Krajewski

Last month, the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), a Washington, DC, think tank, released the intriguing report “Game Changers: Disruptive Technology and U.S. Defense Strategy.” The analysis contained within is a result of a series of wargames done in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Defense. What follows are two views on the value, highlights, and weaknesses in the work.

Scott:

For regular visitors to this site, a good part of Game Changers serves as a familiar retread covering technologies through to hold the most promise of upsetting the current way of war. Additive manufacturing, autonomous drones, directed energy, cyber capabilities, and human performance modification (HPM) are all evaluated for their potential to drastically affect how future militaries function and wars are fought. Admittedly we have not talked much about HPM beyond human-machine interaction, such as augmented reality devices.* If you have not had a chance to read up on these topics, the report serves as a nice primer.

As for the purpose of the work, the key argument is that the U.S. should not rest on its laurels in science and technology (S&T) investments because it has, post-WWII, relied on a qualitative over quantitative military. If the qualitative edge slips, the thinking goes, the military’s edge over potential adversaries slips. The take-away is that “technological dominance is a strategic choice.” Unfortunately, having had this dominance for some time there is an inertia-inducing temptation to believe that it will always be so, necessitating that the U.S. actively guard against a desire to rest on its laurels. The report intriguingly argues that this complacency is compounded by the fact that a technologically dominant power has less incentive to develop revolutionary tech because it would be relatively less useful than for a weaker power.

The authors sound two additional warnings. First, thanks to globalization they note it has never been easier for competitors and even non-state actors to access disruptive technology and nip at the heels of American technological dominance. It is certainly true that information-sharing advances have enabled technology diffusion. Yet some tech, even when accessible, requires a high-degree of expertise and training to be used, or requires specialized components and rare material. Nuclear weapons come to mind. Even in these cases info-sharing lowers the barriers, but it does not completely remove them.

The second point is more of a double-edged sword, and that’s how the commercial sector will drive the development of much of the innovation in these technologies. On one hand, this leaves the same tech more accessible to groups of varied motives, as noted above. On the other, it means that private investments will advance the tech that the military wants. But not all the way. In many instances the larger commercial market will prove more lucrative, leaving a gap in specifications between the commercial supply and military demand, so the authors are correct to note that the military must retain the capability to “translate key technologies from the commercial world and apply them to tomor¬row’s military challenges.” Unstated, but also important, is the ability to identify early on what those key gaps will be (certainly no easy task) so that the military can continue to exploit the latest advances. As the report later notes, the potential for a new tech to be game-changing falls within is short time-frame.

My biggest disappointment with the report was that the analytical framework for explaining what makes a new technology a game-changer was somewhat muddled. There’s a disconnect between figures, introduced-but-unexplained terms, and the text of the report. I assume that these were explained in more detail during the series of wargames, but for those without access to that background the result is a little bit confusing. It does raise some interesting points about cultural factors that can act as hindrances to tech adoption, and the broader point comes through, that even with the emergence of a revolutionary technology a series of other factors must converge to make it useful and utilized to game-changing effect in the military. But it would be interesting to learn more about the thinking behind particularly the “perspectives” and “congruence” factors.

LT Scott Cheney-Peters is a surface warfare officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve and the former editor of Surface Warfare magazine. He is the founding director of the Center for International Maritime Security and holds a master’s degree in National Security and Strategic Studies from the U.S. Naval War College. The opinions and views expressed in this post are his alone and are presented in his personal capacity. They do not necessarily represent the views of U.S. Department of Defense or the U.S. Navy.

*Full disclosure, Andrew Herr, whose work on HPM is cited is a former classmate of mine and friend, while fellow CIMSECian Matt Hipple and I had the honor of having our Proceedings article on naval applications of 3d-printing cited.

Prezymek:

The title of CNAS’ new report might more appropriately be called “Looking Beyond Technology.” Faith in technology is so strong in this document that the authors make technology the central theme of American dominance? in spite of the fact that the otherwise-excellent arguments presented show something different. The authors admit that technology by itself is not a game-changer—it needs to be applied under specific circumstances:

“The framework includes four primary areas that all must converge for a technology to be truly game changing: congruence, perspectives, societal values and organizational culture and time. The core elements of a game-changing technology are the technology itself, a concept for its use and a relevant problem.”

This raises a series of questions: Why the stress on technology and not on the concept, relevant problem, or other conditions described so well? Does a technology itself possess inherent attributes making it a game changer? If not, is it possible that ANY technology could become a game changer given the right circumstances? Or maybe the best model to use would be Aristotle’s golden mean and the interaction of a technology and a concept? To better understand the subject the authors offer some examples. One of them is Blitzkrieg:

“Blitzkrieg is a clear example of how such congruence works: integrating fast tanks, aircraft and two-way radios into an operational concept of advanced maneuver warfare obviated the largely defensive technologies of Germany’s opponents (most famously, France’s Maginot Line).”

Blitzkreig: Looking Back, Looking Forward

There is no need here to search for the game-changing technology. Tanks, airplanes, and radio were not only well known to Germany’s opponents but were invented by them. Blitzkrieg is, in fact a tactical concept and the one which wasn’t successful from the beginning so needed refinement in many exercises. Williamson Murray in his essay, “May 1940: Contingency and Fragility of the German RMA,” offers an interesting comment on this military innovation:

“For French and British officers in summer 1940, the Germans had clearly developed a revolutionary style of war. But to some German officers the secret of German success was the careful evolutionary development of concepts that had their origins in the battles of the First World War.”

Downplaying the role of concept is visible in another example in the report, that of aircraft carriers:

“The adoption of these platforms by new actors may be disruptive, or may increase competition in terms of power projection, but is not fundamentally game changing.”

I agree. It was Germany’s adoption of tanks, planes, and radio in the case of Blitzkrieg, but how they used them. But what will happen if U.S. adversaries would merge carriers with an innovative concept of operations? Would the aircraft carrier become a game changer again?

There are many technical innovations that offer U.S. qualitative advantage. During the Cold War cruise missiles, MLRS, IDF Tornado strike fighters among others offered possibility to counterbalance quantitative superiority of Warsaw Pact armies. But these were also blended together with a deep-strike concept allowing the U.S. to isolate first echelons from reinforcements, thus avoiding immediate overwhelming numbers of defenders.

Paradoxically, the report offers remedy to its own concentration on technology. In the very beginning there is a phrase, “Whether a stone or a drone, it simply becomes a tool we apply to a task.” We should never forget that technology, however useful and important, it is just a tool in the hands of a man. As the military thinks about the future, my recommendation is to empower tactics-oriented naval officers who possess a basic understanding of the implications technology brings to tactical situations. Such officers, willing to think through the tactical advantages emerging technologies could bring, offer the best chance to keep a technical advantage, if that is a pillar of strategy.

Przemek Krajewski, alias Viribus Unitis, is a blogger in Poland. His area of interest is the broad context of purpose and structure for navies and promoting discussions on these subjects in his country.

Fostering the Discussion on Securing the Seas.