| Small Wars Journal

When President Obama arrives in Colombia... he will hear Latin American leaders say that the US-orchestrated war on drugs, which criminalizes drug use and employs military tactics to fight gangs, is failing and that broad changes need to be considered...

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Disruptive Thinkers... at USNI

The craze started by Ben Kohlmann's essay and was then taken up by me and the legendary Doctrine Man has made its way to the pages of the U.S. Naval Institute blog with a post by LCDR B.J. Armstrong. As a reminder, you can find all of the disruptive thinkers pieces as they are published by going to this page at SWJ.

There are places and people that have a long tradition of creative thinking, problem solving, and innovation. A great deal of military innovation throughout history has come from junior and mid-grade officers. LCDR Claude Berube has documented the Naval Institute’s history of junior officer innovation and the rise of the Institute from a small group of officers on shore duty to a pre-eminent thought center. There is a movement within USNI that is growing to bring JO’s and mid-grade Officers back to the pages of Proceedings with their innovative thoughts. This is important, but not enough by itself.

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Disruptive thinking is, however, the starting point. We need critical thinking that starts with new ideas and we need to develop those into innovative solutions that are researched and workable. Just pointing out problems doesn’t get us anywhere. John Boyd, another great example from Ben’s essay, always did his homework and knew exactly what the staff-pukes were going to ask at the end of his briefs. Their questions were usually intended to try and derail him or embarrass him. But, he used his research to set traps for them, using their own questions and lack of homework against them to help push his ideas through the Pentagon bureaucracy. He wasn’t just disruptive, he had the research done in advance and the solutions ready which made him unstoppable.

Please visit the USNI blog to read more.

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Mohammed Merah, a young radicalized Frenchman, traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2010 and 2011. Over an eight-day period in March 2012, he killed three military personnel, three Jewish children, and one Jewish teacher in a shooting spree that horrified and shocked the French nation. On March 11, he shot dead Staff Sergeant Imad Ibn Ziaten in a parking lot in broad daylight. Four days later, on March 15, he killed first class private Mohammed Legouad and Lance Corporal Abel Chenouf and wounds seriously Lance Corporal Loic Lieber in a small strip mall near their barracks amidst a crowd of bystanders. On March 19, he killed three Jewish children and a Jewish teacher as they arrived at the Ozar-Hatorah school in Toulouse. Another older student was wounded. The R.A.I.D., the French version of a SWAT police unit, killed him after a 32-hour siege.

A Plot Inspired and Driven by Al-Qaeda?

Merah’s modus operandi was chillingly efficient and savagely barbaric. The murderer approached his victims on a scooter, clad in black, and wearing a helmet. He opened fire on his victims at point blank range with a .45 caliber semi-automatic pistol, aiming precisely at their upper bodies and heads. There was no escaping his wrath. “I can still see the flames coming out of the barrel. He killed the last soldier like an animal,” reported an employee of the newspaper stand nearby the automated teller where Merah shot the three soldiers.

The killer was a 24 year-old French citizen of Muslim faith. During conversations with the police negotiator publicized by Prosecutor Michel Molins, Mehra claimed to be affiliated with Al-Qaeda and trained by Al-Qaeda in Waziristan. He further indicated that he had received guidelines from Al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan to conduct terrorist attacks in France and warned that his actions were part of a larger campaign. He also said that he had planned to continue his killing spree by killing more police officers and soldiers. According to Michel Molins, he had already identified the individuals to be killed. Organizational links to Al-Qaeda have yet to be proven, but intelligence officials are convinced that Merah radicalized himself watching al-Qaeda video propaganda on the Internet.

In a telephone call to France 24 two hours before the police laid siege to his apartment, Merah claimed responsibility for all three attacks. He said he carried out the attacks against the soldiers to protest the French law forbidding the wearing of the head-to-toe veil known as burqa and to protest French intervention in Afghanistan. He chose to target soldiers because they are a symbol of the State, but chose the individuals randomly. He chose to attack Jewish children supposedly to avenge his “Palestinian brothers and sisters.” Here again, he chose Jewish targets as a symbol of Israel but targeted the individuals randomly.

New Challenges for French Counter-Terrorism

These attacks and the failure to prevent them pose the series of new unexpected challenges to the French government.

The modus operandi is strikingly different from past Salafist-Jihadist attacks in France. Handgun attacks are more reminiscent of radical Marxist Palestinian factions such as Abu Nidal or Corsican or Basque terrorist attacks. Up until a few weeks ago, Salafist-Jihadists’ preferred mode of action consisted of planting bombs in the public square. Merah’s M.O. is consistent with Abu Musab al Suri’s recommendation to engage in small-scale independent acts of anti-Western terror. Moreover, Salafist-Jihadist attacks have largely been mass attacks geared at killing as many as possible regardless of their individual status in society. Merah’s attacks are different. He carefully chose his victims in accordance with Al-Qaeda’s definition of its enmity: French soldiers representing the crusaders who occupy Islamic lands, and Jews who represent the state of Israel. In the past, mass attacks that killed indiscriminately made it easier for the government to mobilize all forces of society against the terrorism, as everyone could easily identify with the victimized bystander. Selected targets might complicate the government’s task as ordinary people not belonging to the categories targeted (the vast majority of people) might feel less connected to or concerned with such attacks.
According to French authorities, Mohammed Mehra is a loner, the product of an “atypical Salafist self-radicalization,” without connection to any “jihadist organization structure known to the services.” If accurate, this is a major departure from past attacks where terrorists were part of a logistical cell affiliated to a larger movement, principally the GIA (Algerian Armed Islamic Group) that provided the resources and expertise necessary to successfully conduct the planned attacks. The absence of a logistical cell threw the surveillance of the DRCI off as they rated Merah at low-risk of carrying out attacks because they saw no cell-related activity. Whether there were no cells, or the cells went unidentified for too long remains to be seen. Either way, it indicates that the painstaking work of monitoring and preventing new attacks will need to be adapted. The government is bound to propose new legislation to close what has appeared as loopholes in the current legislation.
Last, Merah behaved like a ‘serial killer.’ In the past, single terrorists carried out one operation, but Merah successfully conducted three attacks and told the R.A.I.D negotiator that he was planning on attacking more soldiers and police officers on the morning the police laid siege to his apartment. Criminologists noted that Merah displayed a deeply narcissistic motivation and a pathological desire to eliminate all those whom, he believes, do not deserve to live; traits consistent with serial killers. He acted with the cold determination and the violent savagery of serial killers. In Monday’s attack, he pursued the frightened daughter of the school’s principal into the schoolyard as she was seeking refuge into the building, to shoot her to death. Moreover, he expressed no regrets for the deaths he caused. Prosecutor François Molins said: “He expressed no regrets. He only regretted not having killed more victims. On the contrary, he boasted that he brought France down to its knees.” The confluence of terroristic and criminal motivations and tactics present new challenges for both the French government and French society. Among those challenges: how does the government detect those individuals before they spur into action? How does society cope with an extended terroristic shooting spree? What is the impact on local socio-economic life if a shooting spree causes of local lock-down?

Political Controversy and Announced Reforms

However unusual the circumstances of the attacks and the profile of Mohammed Merah, the failure to prevent him and the length of time (eight days) it took to identify and neutralize him prompted unusually vocal criticisms of the Intelligence Services and calls for reforms.

Amidst a tough presidential campaign, opposition leaders openly wondered whether the Intelligence Directorate (DCRI) did all that was necessary in a timely manner.The fact that Merah was identified as a potential suspect after the first attack but left to his own device until after the murderous spree at the Ozar hatorah school eight days later remains a key point of criticism.François Hollande, the candidate for the Socialist Party, suggested that a full review of all counter-terrorism laws and structures might be in order.Subsequently, the socialist group in the Senate requested that the chiefs from the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (Erard de Corbin de Mangoux) and from the Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur (Bernard Squarcini) appear before a Senate panel.Meanwhile, the extreme-right candidate Marine Le Pen lambasted the government for being too soft on radical Islamists.

In response to the political firestorm, the government has adopted a four-prong approach.First, it publicly defended the State’s services, praising the actions of both the DCRI and the police.Second, the government quelled the Socialist request for a hearing of the two Intelligence chief, accusing the Socialist Party of playing politics ahead of the elections.Third, the government announced a new anti-terrorism legislation aimed at criminalizing radical Islamist Internet surfing and as well as traveling to insurrectionary countries. A government spokesman announced a draft law for the end of April. Lastly, the government cracked down on presumed radical Islamist groups in two nationwide operations. So far, 13 militants are under arrest. These operations indicate that the government may be attempting to neutralize not only groups that act violently, but also those who advocate the use of violence.

It is likely that serious internal reassessment of how to detect radicalized individuals is already underway as the French government does not want a repeat of the Merah episode.More serious legislative initiative and/or organizational reorganization will probably have to wait after the Presidential Elections in May 2012.

Social Media and Unconventional Warfare

Writing in the April issue of Special Warfare, LTC Brian Petit takes a look at the role of social media.

Social media — blogs, social-network sites, information aggregators, wikis, livecasting, video sharing — has decisively altered that most extreme of socio-politico acts: revolution. The 2011 Arab Spring revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East were engineered through citizen-centric computer and cellular-phone technologies that streamed web-enabled social exchanges. The Arab Spring has profound implications for the U.S. special-operations mission of unconventional warfare. This article posits that the study, practice and successful execution of future UW must deliberately account for and incorporate social media.

H/T Dave Maxwell

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The Black Flag Flies in Mali

Writing at the al-Wasat blog, Andrew Lebovich described the unstable situation in Mali's north.

Less than two weeks after a group of Malian junior officers led a coup against the government of president Amadou Toumani Touré, Mali’s war in the north has fallen apart. In a three-day period that ended Monday, Tuareg rebels had seized the three major northern towns of Kidal, Gao, and Timbuktu, victories unparalleled in the past. ...

The rush to capitalize on the dissolution of Mali’s army in the north has brought to the fore deep conflicts between the MNLA and the salafist-inspired Ansar Al-Din, and brought two terrorist groups who call northern Mali home – Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and its “splinter” group the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJWA) out of the woodwork. ...

The situation in northern Mali remains fluid, and the MNLA may not have time for complicated machinations. Until today it had seemed increasingly possible that the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) would send a peacekeeping detachment to Mali, though the contours and rules around an eventual deployment were never clear. Reports indicate that ECOWAS and the Malian junta reached a deal for Captain Amadou Sanogo tostep aside in favor of an interim transitional government to be led by parliamentary speaker Diouncounda Traore. In return, ECOWAS will remove travel and trade sanctions put in place following the coup.

Regardless of what’s going on in the south, though, the north will likely remain unstable, and the MNLA must move quickly to reassert its position in northern Mali. If not, it may find itself shut out of the major power centers in the newly “liberated” Azawad, left to contend with an increasingly assertive and entrenched “desert fox.”

Read much more insightful analysis here.

Peter J. Munson Sat, 04/07/2012 - 11:04am

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This Week at War: Syria as Prologue

In my Foreign Policy column, I discuss how Saudi Arabia and Iran are fighting a proxy war in Syria. It will be their most intense yet, and not their last.

The Turkish government hosted a conference last weekend in Istanbul to discuss possible international responses to Syria's budding civil war. The conference attendees, including the United States along with dozens of other countries and organizations, called themselves the "Friends of Syria" and declared open support for the rebels fighting the Syrian army. The Friends also announced substantial financial support for the rebellion, including $100 million -- pledged by Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) -- to pay salaries to the fighters, a direct inducement to government soldiers to defect to the rebellion. For its part, the U.S. government pledged an additional $12 million in humanitarian assistance to international organizations aiding the Syrian opposition. This assistance will include satellite communications equipment for rebel fighters and night vision goggles. Attending the conference, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said discussions were occurring on "how best to expand this support."

The broad and growing international support for the Syrian rebels is no doubt motivated by several concerns. On a humanitarian level, Bashar al-Assad's security forces are now suspected of killing more than 9,000 civilians over the past year. From this perspective, non-lethal assistance to the opposition seems the least the international community can do to help civilians cope with the widespread disorder inside the country.

At a more practical level, leaders like Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, host of the Istanbul conference, undoubtedly fear population displacement and cross-border refugee flows as a result of the fighting. Assisting the rebels may help keep them and their supporting populations inside the country. Erdogan's support for the rebels may also be an acknowledgement that Assad's remaining time may be limited. If there is to be regime change in Damascus, Erdogan and other leaders will be in a better position to protect their interests if they already have a supportive relationship with Syria's future leaders.

It is at the strategic level where the stakes in Syria are high and rising. The country has become a battleground in the proxy war between Saudi Arabia and its smaller Sunni-Arab neighbors against Iran. Smaller versions of the Saudi-Iran proxy war have played out in Bahrain, Lebanon, and Yemen. The clash in Syria raises the intensity and the stakes to a much higher level.

Should the Assad regime fall and Syria's Sunni majority win control, Iran would suffer a crushing geo-strategic defeat. Not only would Tehran lose a loyal and well-located ally, Tehran's line of support to Hezbollah in southern Lebanon would be imperiled. The arrival of Sunni control in Syria might also boost the morale and material support of Iraq's anti-Iranian Sunni minority, a development Riyadh would no doubt welcome.

The proxy war in Syria provides Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and their friends with a chance to develop and employ their emerging capabilities in covert action, subversion, and irregular warfare. Over the past three decades, the Quds Force -- the external covert action arm of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) -- has achieved remarkable success building up Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, and supporting anti-U.S. militias in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since the 1980s, Iran has demonstrated great skill at using covert action and deniable proxies to intimidate adversaries while simultaneously avoiding conventional military retaliation. If these techniques are warfare's latest weapons, Saudi Arabia and its allies likely desire to have them in their own armories.

During last year's rebellion in Libya, tiny Qatar punched way above its weight when it sent hundreds of military advisors to assist the fighters who eventually overwhelmed Muammar al-Qaddafi's security forces. Saudi Arabia has called for arming Syria's rebels, an operation that would presumably entail many of the same tactics Qatar employed in its successful unconventional warfare campaign in Libya. If the Saudis are serious about fighting the proxy war in Syria, the kingdom and its allies will have to master the irregular warfare techniques that both the Quds Force and Qatari special forces have recently used.

The emerging civil war in Syria harkens back to the Spanish civil war in the late 1930s. That ugly conflict drew in Europe's great powers and served as both as a proving ground for the weapons and tactics that would be used a few years later in World War II and as an ideological clash between fascism and socialism. For Saudi Arabia and Iran, the stakes in Syria are likely even higher than they were for Germany and the Soviet Union in Spain, which could add to the likelihood of escalation.

It is Syria's rebels that need some more escalation from their outside friends. The Istanbul conference was one small success but the rebels will need more. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has argued that Syria's rebels will never defeat the army, even if they are eventually "armed to the teeth." Without more explicit external intervention, he is very likely correct. In Libya, the rebels benefited greatly from NATO's air power, which attacked massing Libyan security forces in their assembly areas, precluded their open movement against rebel locations, and provided close air support for the rebels during the final drive on Tripoli. The Syrian army faces none of these threats as it maneuvers against rebel concentrations.

Syria's rebels should not look to the sky for the support Libya's rebels received. NATO will not intervene. U.S. support will very likely remain minor, discreet, and indirect. And as much as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE may want to prevail in Syria, their air forces don't have the technical skills to do over Syria what NATO did over Libya.

For now, cash is the weapon of choice in Syria rather than laser-guided bombs. Saudi Arabia hopes to buy the Syrian army rather than bomb it. For this war, the kingdom's oil-financed bank accounts may be more powerful than its squadrons of F-15 fighter-bombers.

Until some event triggers military escalation, Riyadh and its friends will have to perfect the black arts of covert action and irregular warfare to fight the war in Syria. When they master these skills, they will be catching up to where the Quds Force has been for a long time. Syria may only be a preview of Saudi-Iranian clashes yet to come.

Decision Point

We know there are problems with commenting in this post, so please weigh in at the original disruptive thinking post until we get this one fixed.

Everyone's favorite cubicle-dweller, Doctrine Man, weighed in at his blog on yesterday's blockbuster article from Ben Kohlmann.

So, as we approach this crossroads, this historical inflection point, we have two choices: one, embrace the disruptive thinkers; or two, push them aside and weather the storm with the “yes men” who seem so content to genuflect at the altar of the status quo. You see, real change is top-driven, but fueled from below. Separating those two layers is a filter that, more often than not, ultimately shapes the course and speed of change. That filtering layer – where you will generally find seasoned O-5s and O-6s – is where ideas either flourish, or are lured into a cul-de-sac and slowly strangled to death. It really is that simple.

Choose your filter, but choose wisely. Who we surround ourselves with during this time is at least as important as who we choose to exclude. If we are to achieve the type of institutional change necessary to transform for the future, we must embrace the disruptive thinkers. We must open our minds to them and allow them to breathe free. This isn’t heresy, it is an absolutism. Or twenty years from now, people who look a lot like us will glance around and utter those fateful words: “I never saw that coming.”

The Executioner's Men: Los Zetas

El Centro Fellows George Grayson and Samuel Logan have published the new work The Executioner's Men: Los Zetas, Rogue Soldiers, Criminal Entrepreneurs, and the Shadow State They Created

A new generation of ruthless pragmatists carves a parallel state across Mexico and Central America. Most powerful among them is Los Zetas, ruled over by Heriberto Lazcano, known as The Executioner. Lazcano and his men have forced a tectonic shift among drug trafficking organizations in the Americas, forever altering how criminal business is conducted in the Western Hemisphere. This narrative brings an unprecedented level of detail in describing how Los Zetas became Mexico’s most diabolical criminal organization.

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Disruptive Thinking, Innovation, Whatever You Want to Call It is Needed for a Military in Crisis

I try to mostly stay out of the comments section of articles now that I'm editor, but I couldn't help jumping into the epic fray over Ben Kohlmann's piece today. I jumped in because I am passionate about this issue and because many of the comments demonstrated - in my mind - exactly the malaise Kohlmann aims to address. In think pieces like this, people love to snipe the suggestions, extrapolate suggestions far beyond their scope to make a strawman that can be knocked down, and condescend about how a junior cannot possibly understand what they are talking about. All were found here today.

First, I implore all of those who have strong opinions on this article and the issues that surround it to submit their essays to us. Even if I violently disagree with you, I will publish all submissions on the topic that are lucid and written well enough to merit our readers time. Clearly, our readers are interested in this topic. While many of the comments picked at the essay, the massive amount of pageviews and the large number of Facebook likes tell me that it resonated with many. Which is a symptom of my next point.

The U.S. military is in crisis. There is a large segment of the force that is disgusted with the bureaucracy and its failures. There are bright young minds who have been given tremendous responsibility in combat and have been far more earnest about learning at a young age because their lives seemed to depend on it. Thrust them into a stodgy, conservative bureaucracy and they are going crazy against its illogic. Some of this may be generational, but some is a combination of the continuing ossification of the organization and its culture just as a cohort with unparalleled combat experience in recent memory rises to levels where they must tread through its morass. Combine the pending withdrawl from Afghanistan, the drawdowns, and a system that doesn't let these "young Turks" (as LtGen Neller termed us, perhaps incorrectly) exert influence to their potential, and you have a recipe for a train wreck. This is only one of numerous salvos that have been fired on this issue recently, but too often they are dismissed, poo-pooed, condescended, or attacked. In the end, the institution seems to be content to ignore them.

I'd like to address a few more issues that came up in the comments. I don't think anyone is suggesting that the military should adopt business practices wholesale or to send every officer to business school. And certainly, entrepreneurs and the business world have their share of failures, as well. But as I look at some of the comments here and on Facebook, the level of hostility toward the business world and the level of arrogance that the military is so far superior to the business world that there's nothing we could deign to learn from them is a symptom of the self-lionization and the isolation from society that we have created in the past decade and more. Not every HBS grad was a Wall Street investment banker precipitating the recession. Many are running the industries that keep the nation and the military going. They and other business people are the ones that keep our economy going, without which there is nothing to defend or to defend it with. Military members increasingly think we are the be all, end all of American society. This is sick and ultimately dangerous thinking and it needs to stop.

Sure, business has had its disasters, but are you telling me that the people who brought you Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghainstan, plus a host of other debacles, constant acquisition nightmares, and the complaint that spending more than the next 19 nations combined on defense isn't enough cannot learn anything from the business world? Are you telling me that since medicine and science have had fraud and failures, we should not seek to learn from them either? Yes, the military is not a business. Everyone gets that. But we should seek to learn from every field we can.

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