Gladwell On The Value Of Learning Like A Marine (YouTube)

Malcolm Gladwell (author of Blink and The Tipping Point) recently spoke at the 92 St. YMCA in New York City. His talk centered on some recent writing he had done but he touches, in this clip, upon the value of treating education the way the Marines treat training rather than the way modeling agencies treat models. It is only about 4 minutes but worth it.

What Do Che Guevara And The CIA Have In Common? (COIN: CARL)

They have both written manuals on staging a revolution! The good people at the Combined Arms Research Library have made available online both Guevara's 1961 text, "Guerrilla Warfare" (direct download here) and the CIA's 1984 book used by the Contras titled, "Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare" (direct download here).

The two texts overlap only in areas. Guevara's book is a more complete manual for the revolutionary while the CIA text is more about crafting the message of the revolutionary forces. There are, however, a number of interesting sections that will resonate with today's COIN specialists. I found Guevara's section on intelligence (which he begins with a quote from Sun Tzu: Know yourself and your adversary and you will be able to fight a hundred battles without a single disaster.) to be the most interesting. Here are a few highlights:

• "Nothing gives more help to combatant forces than correct information. This arrives spontaneously from the local inhabitants, who will come to tell its friendly army, its allies, what is happening in various places; but in addition it should be completely systematized."
  

• "Men and women, especially women, should infiltrate; they should be in permanent contact with soldiers and gradually discover what there is to be discovered."
  

• "The peasants, not accustomed to precise battle language, have a strong tendency to exaggerate, so their reports must be checked."

The CIA manual contains a number of interesting nuggets as well:

• "Every member of the struggle should know that his political mission is as important as, if not more important than, his tactical mission."
  

• "Armed propaganda in small towns, rural villages, and city residential districts should give the impression that our weapons are not for exercising power over the people, but rather that the weapons are for protecting the people..."
  

• "Cover ("Facade") Organizations. The fusion of several organizations and associations recognized by the government, through internal subjective control, occurs in the final stages of the operation, in close cooperation with mass meetings."
  

• "Control Of Mass Demonstrations. The mixture of elements of the struggle with participants in the demonstration will give the appearance of a spontaneous demonstration, lacking direction, which will be used by the agitators of the struggle to control the behavior of the masses."
  

• "Too often we see guerrilla warfare only from the point of view of combat actions. This view is erroneous and extremely dangerous. Combat actions are not the key to victory in guerrilla warfare but rather form part of one of the six basic efforts. There is no priority in any of the efforts, but rather they should progress in a parallel manner. The emphasis or exclusion of any of these efforts could bring about serious difficulties, and in the worst of cases, even failure. The history of revolutionary wars has shown this reality."
  

By far, my favorite part of this text, however, is in the appendix which seeks to acquaint the revolutionary with the rhetorical practices of anaphora, prolepsis and preterition (among others). You kinda have to see it to believe it...

Origins Of FBI Counterintelligence And More (LOC)

The Library of Congress provides an excellent teaching/training/research resource through its periodic webcasts. One of the most recent is a 50+ minute presentation on the Origins of FBI Counterintelligence done by Ray Batvinis (who has just authored a book on the same topic).

Other webcasts that may be of interest include:

Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy

Why Terrorist Ideologies are So Powerful

War of Nerves: Chemical Warfare from World War I to Al-Qaeda"

The African Colonial State and the Encounter with Decolonization

China's Return to Tradition: How to Interpret the New Forces Emerging in China

China Rediscovers its Own History

You will need a RealPlayer plug-in to view the webcasts.

SAM Afghan Edition, Part II (IEDs In Iraq And Afghanistan: CRS)

IEDs are well known in Iraq but I have not seen as much concerning their use in Afghanistan. This recent report from the CRS gives some insight into IED use in both places and some of the countermeasure initiatives currently under way.

Highlights from the text include:

• "Improvised explosive devices, also known as IEDs, roadside bombs, and suicide car bombs, have caused over 70% of all American combat casualties in Iraq and 50% of combat casualties in Afghanistan, both killed and wounded."
  

• "In Afghanistan, the IED munitions supply is supported by funds from an expanding opium trade."
  

• "However, DOD officials have also stated that in Afghanistan, Taliban fighters have increased both the number and lethality of their IED attacks."
  

• "DOD has found that insurgents build and deploy IEDs by using networks that, for centuries in Afghanistan and Iraq, have formed the sinews of commerce and survival for tribes and factions. A typical IED terrorist cell consists of six to eight people, including a financier, bomb maker, emplacer, triggerman, spotter, and often a cameraman. Videos of exploding U.S. vehicles and dead Americans are distributed via the Internet to win new supporters."
  

• "Threat data about IEDs is tightly controlled by DOD to avoid giving feedback to the enemy about the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of different IED designs. Also, proprietary rights must be protected for those companies who produce IED countermeasures. However, these controls may sometimes limit access by other companies to important information about the effectiveness of anti-IED systems as they are tested or used in battle."
  

SAM Afghan Edition, Part I (RAND)

There are two good reports on Afghanistan in my feeds this morning. The first is by Dr. Seth Jones from RAND and Georgetown University and contains testimony dated December, 2007 regarding the state of the Afghan insurgency given to Canada's Senate. You can download the full text here. I will try to get the second report out later today.

The assessment is fairly grim in the details but provides some concrete suggestions for the way ahead. Here are some of the highlights (Boldface, notes, italics and hyperlinks are mine):

• "The evidence I have collected from repeated trips to Afghanistan between 2003 and 2007 indicates that there is an increasingly violent insurgency that threatens the country. It includes a range of insurgent groups, such as the Taliban, the Haqqani network (Note: Operates in the Fata region of Pakistan. For a complete tribal breakdown of the region click here), foreign fighters (including al Qaeda), Hezb-i-Islami, criminal organizations, and some allied tribes and sub-tribes. The overall number of insurgent-initiated attacks increased by 400 percent from 2002 to 2006, and the number of deaths from these attacks increased over 800 percent during the same period."
  

• "Provinces that I could drive to only a few months ago, such as Wardak and Lowgar, are now off limits except to those willing to gamble with their lives."
  

• "As one senior NATO official told me, NATO and Afghan forces control at most 20 percent of southern Afghanistan. The rest is controlled by Taliban or a range of sub-state groups."
  

• "The situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan significantly impacts the national security of NATO countries, including Canada. The Pakistan-Afghanistan border region is the headquarters of al Qaeda, which is in some ways a more competent international terrorist organization than it was on September 11, 2001."
  

• "What explains the insurgency in Afghanistan that now engulfs roughly half the country? 'The answer is simple,” one senior Afghan government official told me in October 2007. 'The people are losing faith in the government. Our security forces cannot protect local villages, and our institutions struggle to deliver basic services.'"
  

• "At its core, the insurgency in Afghanistan is not about religion, as some mistakenly believe...In general, the problem is not that most Afghans inherently support the Taliban. It is that patience with the Afghan government is wearing thin...Indeed, the primary challenge in Afghanistan is one of governance."
  

• "Perhaps the most basic governance challenge in Afghanistan is security."

• "Another major challenge is corruption. Afghans have become increasingly frustrated with national and local government officials who are viewed as corrupt and self-serving."
  

• "Afghanistan has also faced challenges from outside actors, which have undermined governance. The first is a limited NATO role."
  

• "Unfortunately, there are no short-term solutions to Afghanistan’s challenges. Research that the RAND Corporation has done indicates that it takes an average of 14 years for governments to defeat insurgent groups. Many also end in a draw, with neither side winning.Insurgencies can also have long tails: approximately 25 percent of insurgencies won by the government and 11 percent won by insurgents lasted more than 20 years."
  

• "This does not mean, however, that Canada or other NATO countries need to – or should – win the insurgency for Afghans. Quite the reverse. While outside actors often play an important role, victory is usually a function of the struggle between the local government and insurgents."
  

• "This means that Canada and other NATO countries can be helpful in assisting the Afghan government. Four steps may be helpful."
  

• "1. Remove from power and prosecute key individuals involved in corruption and criminal activity, including Afghan government officials."
  

• "2. Increase NATO and Afghan National Army resources in the south."

• "3. Establish a regional approach to Afghanistan, including countering the sanctuary in Pakistan."

• 4. Establish an institutional arrangement to improve international cooperation.

• "Afghanistan is not hopeless. To be fair, NATO operations have had mixed success thus far. But the insurgency will ultimately be won or lost in the rural areas of Afghanistan, not in the cities. Success in ending the insurgency will take time and sufficient resources. It would be a tragedy if the naysayers in Canada succeeded in reducing their country’s commitment."