In this first debate, Mr. Nathan P. Freier, CSIS/PKSOI, and Dr. Steven Metz, SSI, discuss the future strategic role of the US Army.

A war that ended three years ago and involved not a single U.S. soldier has become the subject of an increasingly heated debate inside the Pentagon, one that could alter how the U.S. military fights in the future.

When Israel and Hezbollah battled for more than a month in Lebanon in the summer of 2006, the result was widely seen as a disaster for the Israeli military. Soon after the fighting ended, some military officers began to warn that the short, bloody and relatively conventional battle foreshadowed how future enemies of the United States might fight.

Since then, the Defense Department has dispatched as many as a dozen teams to interview Israeli officers who fought against Hezbollah. The Army and Marine Corps have sponsored a series of multimillion-dollar war games to test how U.S. forces might fare against a similar foe. "I've organized five major games in the last two years, and all of them have focused on Hezbollah," said Frank Hoffman, a research fellow at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory in Quantico...

More at The Washington Post.

I just came out of a conversation with an editor at a major magazine, in which I was embarassingly incapable of intelligently relating my own alleged expertise on insurgent and terrorist sanctuaries to an open discussion that just threaded its way through the blogosphere over the last few days. The conversation forced me to think hard about what my issues were with the debate, which earn said editor an acknowledgments whenever I get my damn book on the subject written. What initiated all of this was Andrew Exum's (a.k.a. Abu Muqawama) short article entitled "No Place To Hide" in The New Republic. Ex made a lot of smart points about safe havens, and as I wrote in an email to him, it's good that he's addressed this publicly and sparked some straight thinking. No one has seriously addressed the problem of militant sanctuaries in years -- really, not since the post-911 Bush Administration's first term, when it was still all about hunting down Al Qaeda honchos and "smoking them out of their holes."

Unfortunately, Ex's write-up, which took the Obama Adminstration's new policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan to task for its "obsession" with physical sanctuary (among other things), was also heavily flawed, for reasons I'll get into below. I've always maintained that most of the policy on denying sanctuary to terrorists has been distracted and partisan, and the scholarly literature, with few exceptions, too misguided or constrained by disciplinary stovepipes to be useful. Likewise any popular understanding of what havens, much less the safe kind, actually mean. All sorts of aphorisms and buzzwords have been bandied about, withouth much consideration to whether they actually apply to the specifics we have to deal with in Afghanistan, Iraq, and a few other trouble spots. I'm highly skeptical, for example, that slapping some pomo jargon or sexed-up architectural theory on the problem will help fix things. I'm equally skeptical that a classical COIN model of sanctuary can be faithfully applied to transnational terror groups without some sort of adaptation.

I want to pursue the theme during this symposium, partly because I think sanctuary in militant thought and practice - particularly in this age of cybernetic and chaoplexic warfare - is at the heart of battlespace regulatory regimes (be they social, legal, or technological). In this, I'd like to push Antoine and Rex in particular to respond (though all are obviously welcome to weigh in). Both, to my mind, have distinct expertise that's relevant here - Antoine on how military managers think about the shape and order of battlespace, and Rex on how a militant organization can exploit the cracks and seams in such systems in order to survive.

Back to Exum's article. There's a lot that's good about it: there's more to safe havens than just the physical dimension; virtual issues need to be dealt with; safe havens have been part and parcel of both COIN and CT missions; and we need to look beyond the Afghanistan/Pakistan horizon to what's next. All sensible points, and I don't have any serious disagreement with his general thrust. For Matthew Yglesias, one take away - quite incorrectly - was that terrorists don't even need a sanctuary. An anonymous commenter observed at Exum's blog that it was next to imposible to see the army for all the straw men populating it. I'll try to address as many of these points as possible in this post. They don't necessarily weave well into a whole, so I'll just deal with them in a sort of stream of consciousness, and try to avoid rambling.

Although terrorists plan and train in the real world, Exum writes, the "common denominator that has emerged from domestic terror threats in places like the United Kingdom is that their staging ground was actually on the internet rather than in a physical 'safe haven'." I'm pretty confident he wasn't trying to paint a picture of wetwired ji-hackers uploading themselves into the net to wreak digital havoc in ethereal form, and he later redressed the editorial misstep that led him referencing the internet per se, rather than web-based propaganda. It's important to acknowledge the role of web technologies and social media as idea-sharing platforms, but the point is frequently -- and easily -- overstated or miscommunicated. Thomas Hegghammer, for example, in response to No Place to Hide, noted that "at the end of the day, the Internet is just the messenger." Well, no, no it's not. It's a vehicle, nothing more, unless you consider the stratcom implications of the message being in the medium - but even so, the messenger as active agent is a third party to all this. Perhaps, in a rewired-for-war robotics sense, the Internet could become the messenger at some point down the road, but that's a distracted aside.

People communicate through the web, and learn from resources hosted on it, and sometimes that communication and learning can lead down the road to extremism. But those features doesn't really make the web any more an "operating environment" or "staging ground" than text messaging, the radio, or the local library. As Tim Stevens put it in his response to Exum, there's a "rather insidious tendency amonst the security establishment to parse the virtual/physical relationship clumsily, many people preferring to focus on one at the expense of the other."

The point about terrorist use of the internet that's consistently glossed over is that it's just as "physical" a resource as training camps in Waziristan, cave complexes in Tora Bora, or safe houses in London. It's anchored in real world hardware and it takes real people to interface with it -- but it's organized, distributed, and accessed in ways that don't look anything like the macro territorial havens we're used to thinking about. The distributed internet is, essentially, a reflection of the transnational networks that exploit the medium. To borrow from Hegghammer, they are the messengers, riding its ruby rails.

That's the difference: physical space can be organized in many different ways, and different kinds of organizations have differing requirements. Guerrilla field armies need controllable territory to go about their business, but transnational networks made of up of linked individuals don't. They need physical space, to be sure; that's not the same thing as territory, in its political sense. So when Ex argues that the new White House policy "betrays an obsession with physical space at the expense of virtual space," it's a fair point, but it misses a more important one: destroy a guerrilla sanctuary, and you may soon have to contend with the networked kind -- small, scattered, more of them, harder to find.

I don't mean to suggest that the world of ideas doesn't count or is even necessarily subsidiary here. I'm in full agreement with Rex Brynen's comment on No Place to Hide: "There are two issues here. The first is the importance of the net for propagandizing and recruitment, which I don't doubt. The second, however, is the extent to which havens may be socially constructed rather than (or as well as being) spatially determined." There's an important corollary argument, for example, in the Orwellian relationship that old school jihadis have with "safe" havens. Some of the early cohort of Afghanistan's anti-Soviet fighters, for example, had been on the run from persecution in their home countries: Osama bin Laden from Saudi authorities, and Al Qaeda no. 2 Ayman Al Zawahiri was a 1970s Egyptian dissident who went on to volunteer his medical skills to the mujahedin in the 1980s. So in a limited sense, they were "safe" in Afghanistan and Pakistan, at least from Egyptian and Saudi lock-up. Zawahiri's own writings suggest that what we think of as sanctuary - conventially, a protected rear area - AQ considers to be front line. The key here is that professional jihadis have consistently sought out the next battlefield, the next arena of jihad, and some of the same names pop up in the wars in Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Chechnya, and so on. The safety they're looking for has never been physical, by any stretch of the imagination. It's spiritual, a sort of preservation of the faith, and it's the kind of connection that's enabled repeated link-ups between transnational networks and local armies.

So where does that leave us? Echoing Antoine Bousquet's writing on closed worlds and cyberneticism, Yglesias writes "You need to be wary of a strategic concept which implies that the security of American citizens requires the United States to achieve effective physical control over 100 percent of the world's land area." This has some bearing on what the White House should reasonably be trying to achieve. Its obsession, Ex argues, is a direct legacy of the Clinton era. He writes: " The policy-makers who crafted the White House strategy largely belong to the generation that cut its teeth in the Clinton White House, when physical havens were in fact the only havens that mattered." That's not exactly accurate. Yes, the Clinton Administration dealt with terrorists holed up in miserable parts of the world. But to the extent that anyone was thinking about "safe havens" or "sanctuaries", it had very little do with the terrorist variety. In the 1990s, "safe havens" were a completely different kind of political football. The liberal internationalism of that era was preoccupied with the plight of civilians caugh in the crossfires of nasty little wars. It established UN safe cities in Bosnia, France's humanitarian enclave in 1994 Rwanda during the genocide, and implemented no-fly zones over Kurdish Iraq. These were a sort of variation on an extraterritorial theme, of the kind of middle ground in international relations that allows for state neutrality, among other things. One might argue, based on that legacy, that acknowledging shades of intermediacy in foreign relations is exactly the recipe driving Obama's rapprochement with the world - the kind of middle-ground-enabling philosophy that can allow for finer grained differentations in COIN and CT operations and leverage greater opportunities for diplomatic engagement.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates is expected to announce on Monday the restructuring of several dozen major defense programs as part of the Obama administration's bid to shift military spending from preparations for large-scale war against traditional rivals to the counterinsurgency programs that Gates and others consider likely to dominate US conflicts in coming decades.

Gates's aides say his plan would boost spending for some programs and take large whacks at others, including some with powerful constituencies on Capitol Hill and among influential contractors, making his announcement more of an opening bid than a decisive end to weeks of sometimes acrimonious internal Pentagon debate.

Among the programs expected to be heavily cut is the Army's Future Combat Systems, a network of vehicles linked by high-tech communications that has been plagued by technical troubles and delays; with a price tag exceeding $150 billion, it is now one of the most costly military efforts...

More at The Washington Post.

Over the past 6 years, provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs) have played a growing role in the U.S. counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan. PRTs are one of several organizations working on reconstruction there, along with civilian development agencies, including the U.S. Agency for International Development, numerous nongovernmental organizations, and the Afghan government's National Solidarity Program. Perhaps unsurprisingly, something of a debate has emerged over whether PRTs are needed. The authors argue that civilian reconstruction agencies cannot do the same job as the PRTs. While these agencies remain essential for long-term economic and political development, the PRTs conduct reconstruction in ways that help create stability in the short term. Absent the PRTs, the "build" in clear-hold-build efforts deemed essential to effective counterinsurgency would fall flat. Based on over 2 months of field research in 2007 and 2 months in 2008 by a CNA team with 4 different PRTs—Khost, Kunar, Ghazni, and Nuristan—plus interviews with the leadership of 10 others, the authors recommend that the United States give the PRTs the lead role in reconstruction activities that accompany any surge of military forces into Afghanistan.

Provincial Reconstruction Teams: How Do We Know They Work?

The Washington Post today introduces the first installment in an on-going series, "Mexico at War: On the Front Lines," about the increasingly violent Mexican drug war. Post reporters Steve Fainaru, William Booth and video producer Travis Fox spent months traveling throughout some of the most dangerous areas and interviewed top officials about their military strategy (a selection of quotes is below). The Post's series will continue throughout the year.

As Mexico Battles Cartels, the Army Becomes the Law - By Steve Fainaru and William Booth

When the Obama administration announced the results of its review of Afghanistan and Pakistan policies on Friday, reporters quizzing the review's authors seemed confused. They wondered whether the recommendations announced by the president amounted to an abandonment or endorsement of the kind of population-centric counter-insurgency strategy employed in Iraq in 2007. Were we embracing a more limited counter-terror mission? Or were we committing ourselves more fully to nation-building?

The aims of the strategy are quite modest: to deny transnational terror groups the ability to use physical space to plan and prepare for attacks on the United States in the way that al-Qaeda used Afghanistan in the years before the 9/11 attacks. And the central problem of the post-Cold War era is that these staging grounds are often in ungoverned spaces like the Pashtun belt straddling the Afghanistan-Pakistan border...

More at The New Republic.

Thursday, in a statement that was issued in part for public diplomacy purposes, DNI Adm. Dennis Blair, dismissed any strategic implications regarding the strength of Mexico's drug cartels that the Mexican government is struggling to suppress...

While it might be tempting to ask what the good Admiral is smoking, Blair is neither a naif nor a fool but a very experienced and saavy intelligence manager who is engaged in pushing a political line of the Obama administration, in deference to the wishes of the government of Mexico. The line is being peddled on many fronts; Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has just declined offers for increased appropriations for improving border security in favor of "surging" Federal agents on a temporary basis (i.e. a political show that will accomplish nothing)...

Much more at ZenPundit.