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Winning (and Losing) the First Wired War
Noah Shachtman writes "The Iraq war was launched on a theory: That, with the right networking gear, American armed forces could control a country with a fraction of the troops ordinarily needed. But that equipment never made it down to the front lines, David Axe (just back from his 6th trip to Iraq) and I note in this month's Popular Science. That's a problem, because the insurgents are using throwaway cellphones and anonymous e-mail accounts to stitch together a network of their own."
... but I don't really think that was the theory the Iraq war was launched on.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerilla_warfare
This again offers the advantage of making it hard to find senior leadership while it has the disadvantage of not allowing them to utilize their assets in a centralized manner which would be far more efficient and effective.
Apparently disposable cell phones are VERY common in developing nations. This means that there is a lot of people to track. If someone can switch phone numbers on a regular basis, tracking and snooping on them can be very hard if a majority of the traffic is legitimate.
You can't control a country with troops. There are three basic components to controlling masses of people. These are religion, Television/Media, and placation.
If you can get people converted to your brand of god it's easy to control them, the more people who believe in your god the more control you have. The vast majority of the worlds population believes in some god or another.
You need to be able to constant bombard the populace with your message and you need to be able to change this message subtly and continuously. In oder to do that you need television. The vast majority of the population view television every night after work. For the vast majority of people their entire waking hours are spend either at work or in front of the TV. As a bonus television makes your eyes focus on a very narrow depth of field which is surprising similar to a hypnotic state. Television is successful mostly because it puts people in a mildly hypnotic state during which they are prone to suggestions. Why do you think people spend a dollar for colored, sugared water?
Finally you need to fill their bellies to kill their ambition (apologies to Lao Tzu). You need to keep them fed and comfortable so that they don't take action against you. You will need to increase wealth till everybody can go to church and afford a TV.
Voila, you are now controlling a country and you don't need a 150,000 soldiers. The largest economy in the world, the richest country in the world with a population of over 300 million people and taking up vast almost unthinkable amount of space is controlled by a surprisingly few people. Much less then 100,000. Hell much less then 50,000.
Look at it another way. A very small cabal of neocons got their boy electected, got themselves into positions of power and took over a country and all it's natural resources with the full consent of the US population. These people (less then a 100 really) "controlled" the US population into waging a war for their beneift/profit/ideology/god.
evil is as evil does
Stopping terrorists means the Terror War funds dry up. Instead, you can spy on domestic political "enemies". Just like in the Drug War, where less drugs means less war means less funding, and you can't keep your population under surveillence.
Both those wars are unwinnable, never expected to win, designed and prosecuted by the same people, and directed against the naive American public - with foreigners as expendible props from Central Casting.
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make install -not war
Even if they do- they're speaking in arabic, it needs to be translated. Most likely, they're speaking in arabic in code. WHich could be very difficult to crack, if anything got lost in translation you may not be able to. You'd almost have to have an arabic speaking code breaker. There can't be too many of those. ANd most likely, the code cycles every few days, the enemy isn't stupid.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I'd bet that those calls are being recorded, too. But so what? How do you know who is calling whom if the phone can't be traced? Perhaps they steal the cell from businessmen, use them for a few days and then abandon them. The NSA could track them back to their legitimate owner, but what about the insurgent that was actually using it?
Without a relational database filled with tons of other personal information, just intercepting a phone call isn't going to do squat. You need voiceprint software, you need street-level info on the caller. Is he a real threat? Where does he hang out? Which faction is he involved with? Simply intercepting a call tells you none of this, usually. And how many Arabic speakers does the NSA employ? If it's anything like the CIA, not nearly enough.
You know, maybe we wouldn't be losing this war so badly if the NSA concentrated on getting intel in Iraq instead of spying on Americans at home. It seems that they are doing a bang-up job of infringing on our rights, but they haven't actually achieved any meaningful successes when it comes to defeating terrorism.
Kinda makes you wonder if fighting terrorism is the real goal....
Electric Monkey Pants
Clearly, what needs to be done is for Congress to pass a "Stop Terrorism NOW" bill that bans cellphones and private email accounts. They are too dangerous if they can be used by terrorists!
Currently hooked on AMP
Disposable cell phones and anonymous email accounts should be banned. If terrorists are using them at the grassroot level, maybe the American voting population could do the same thing to throw out the current administration. Opps... I didn't meant to say that out aloud. Now Dick Cheney will be hunting me down for my RNC card. :P
I seem to remember the telegraph having been used extensively during the American civil war. Warfighters have used communication technology for thousands of years. Even Sun Tzu talked of using flags and drums for communication.
If by "wired war" we're talking about the use of telecommunications technologies we have to consider the telegraph. The American civil war is the first conflict I can think of where it was used as a strategic communications tool but it had been around for about 20 years by that point, so it's possible that telecommunications had been used in a major conflict prior to that.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
The insurgency is still viable. Not only viable, it is growing.
If the insurgency can outlast our occupation, they have, by definition, "won".
Strategically, there are more factors than just them fighting us. There's also our huge debt and deficit. There's also the price of a gallon of gas.
We are NOT fighting this war to "win". That is obvious because we are not focusing on the strategy that will allow us to remain in Iraq long enough to outlast the insurgency. As a country, we need to start rationing and saving. Just like in WW2.
Instead, we're sending the National Guard to Iraq, and then to the Mexican border. Because we cannot afford to correctly handle either situation.
The insurgency will "win" when we leave.
And we will leave before the insurgency dies. Because we will be broke.
"The Pentagon's pursuit of network-centric warfare began in the info-tech boom of the 1990s--largely influenced by, of all things, Wal-Mart."
You do realize that it's WalMart's logistical and networking infrastructure which has made as unstoppable and large as it is today, right? Remember, when WalMart started, it was nothing more than a bigger, less fancy, five and dime store, completely beneath the notice of the giants of the time - Sears and K-Mart. Today, WalMart dominates the landscape, and Sears/K-Mart are also-rans. And yet, Sam Walton managed to go from one little store in Bentonville, AR to leader of the US retailing indstry - selling pretty much the exact same items as Sears/K-Mart.
Everybody learns from WalMart. Why should the government be an exception?
Terrorists have no use for the DoD's C4ISR (command, control, communications, computing, intelligence, surveilence, reconisance) capability. Because it generates a huge foot print, is highly sensitive to decapitation attacks, is massively centralized and is extremely dependent upon huge resources. In fact, terrorists love to disrupt just such systems. For example the central command post for disaster response, and the corresponding antennas for New York were located in and on the World Trade Center.
This is the central point of asymetric warfare. Effective insurgencies employ highly decentralized, organic and redundant C3I structures which degrade gracefully under attack. The highly centralized C4ISR structure of Iraq's Regular Army collapsed over a period of days as a result of decapitation attacks, twice. On the other hand the insurgency remains highly effective despite intensive attacks over a period of 3 years. As for intelligence, the insurgency is quite effective as evidenced by the number of ambushes, assasinations and kidnappings sucessfully pulled off. You can't fight termites with a sniper rifle.
To provide another analogy, the bane of Organized Crime is accounting. While the Mafia (which developed from a Sicilian insurgency) is often resillient to conventional procecution over their violent crimes, the need for systematic accounting and banking often proves to be their Achilles heel.
While terrorists and insurgencies can and do exploit high tech is is usually in a fashion quite different in structure of established goverments. Read "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" for a good example.
They are too busy monitoring calls between American citizens within the United States.
The article misses an important point, I think. It speaks about the full spectrum of US involvement in Iraq as if it were all one affair. The invasion was successful in that American forces rapidly toppled the Iraqi government and defeated those Iraqi forces that presented resistence. That was a purely military operation, and the American technology that was designed for high-intensity conflict worked quite well.
However, at the conclusion of the invasion, American forces had to switch to peacemaking activity. American units in Iraq are part of a larger civil-military effort, and regardless of whether you feel the effort will succeed in the long run or not, it clearly hasn't succeeded yet. The invasion lasted 21 days. The peacemaking effort has lasted three years. According to the Army's own manual on low-intensity conflict, peacemaking operations run into trouble if they last too long:Low-intensity insurgency/counterinsurgency operations have always been markedly different than all-out war. Technology is not the force multiplier that it is in high-intensity operations. The most important factors in the success of counterinsurgency operations are political. Troops on the ground are constantly engaged in diplomacy, as the article demonstrated. But soldiers and marines do not conduct their negotiations in a vacuum. If the larger political context is not positive, soldiers confronting insurgents are fighting an uphill battle.
In Iraq, the locals know the physical environment. They know the cultural environment intimately. They know the individuals and organizations that influence a particular area. Regardless of sectarian schisms, they share a common religion. Technology gives occupiers no advantage in dealing with these advantages enjoyed by insurgents. Getting involved with the locals and making them feel comfortable often requires taking some risks in order to demonstrate good intentions. The American approach, which emphasizes technology and force protection above all else, may actually hinder the development of trust between locals and American forces.
The larger issue is that while Saddam placed his trust in generals who only gave him news he wanted to hear, the Secretary of Defense seemed to feel that American warfighting technology would win the war and somehow obviate the need for occupation of Iraq. As we have found out, the miscalculation was enormous.
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American foriegn lanquage skills are notably crappy. Most of our farsi translators are of questionable use in counter insurgency.
Holy Shit! You did not just say that copyrights cause terrorism, did you? Yeah, copyrights can be a pain in the ass sometimes, but damn... Take a breather and get some perspective dude.
> What progress can insurgents really say they have made since the start of the war?
Quite a bit, unfortunately.
For a start, they've successfully prevented much of our reconstruction efforts. The large majority of the funds set aside for reconstruction have been allocated, but oil production, electricity generation, water, sewer systems, road networks, security, and employment are all around or below pre-war levels. Security and employment troubles are especially bad - about 1,000 civilians and police/military are being violently killed per month now, as opposed to well under a tenth of that in the last years of Hussein's regime, and unemployment is running at about 40%, making insurgency or crime look tempting to large numbers of desperate young men with nothing else to occupy their time.
If the money runs out and Iraq still hasn't been effectively rebuilt, the insurgents have scored a major victory. Without that rebuilding, it's questionable whether the democratic reforms we've started in Iraq can really take root - without jobs, security, and infrastructure, the new society will remain extremely fragile. That fragility isn't so much of a problem at the moment, since it's widely known that a great deal of time, money, and effort is being spent to rebuild Iraq. If that effort fails to bear fruit, though, the insurgents will have successfully undercut our attempt to stabilize the situation, and it's not clear that we'll give it a second try.
That's the thing about asymmetric warfare like this: the status quo means the insurgents are winning. Our task is to create order; theirs is to maintain chaos.
We all know US troops won't be there forever, meaning every day that passes without enough order being created is a day the insurgents make progress. The greater the chaos in the country when US troops finally leave, the greater the opportunity for insurgents to move into the power vaccuum and exert greater control over the country. If this happens, they win.
Essentially, we're in a race against time - we need to make Iraq stable, safe, and prosperous before we leave - and "progress" for the insurgents is simply blocking our progress towards that goal. Every day Iraq doesn't get better fast enough - every time a pipeline is attacked, every time a hospital isn't built because security costs took up the construction budget, every time a death squad murders civilians of the "wrong group" - the insurgents make progress.
The shorter our withdrawal timetable, the more progress we have to make each day, and hence the more progress the insurgents make when we fall behind. If we truly are willing to stick this out - and remember that the average counter-insurgency of this type lasts 9 years - they have almost no chance of winning. But they're betting we won't - or can't - and it's not clear they're wrong. It's an alarming situation. I hope this is a race we win, even if it means we have to eat crow to get the manpower it takes.
If what Colin Powel presented to the UN is representative, and signals intelligence is supposed to be one of America's better areas, then I'm very concerned.
I differ.
"Loss depend on not getting the objectives you want. And therefore the US has lost (remember - the cakewalk? Did that happen?)"
The objective was not to achieve "a cakewalk" - the objective of the US and allied military was to toss out the Saddam backed government and replace it with a government that would not threaten the US and that would be more open and more democratic. And to do so with the minimum use of force needed.
So looking at the facts, it is a success. The new government and parliament were seated today, the result of a series of plebicitess, constitutional votes and generla elections, nationwide. And the combat fatality count of US & Allied troops due to enemy action (exclude heart attacks, accidents, etc) is historically amazingly low for such a large scale operation.
Before the mods go ape on me for being a "Bushie" - observe that the goal and achievement were at question - and thats what I'm looking at, as clearly as looking at whether Napoleon acheived his victory at Waterloo (he didn't - losing his bid to split the allied armies into 2 parts and defeat each in detail, ensuring the survival of his Imperial reign), or the Germans achieved their goals in the Franco Prussian wars (they did with the awarding of Alsace-Lorraine, etc).
This isnt to say the goal and its acheivement was "right" or "just" or "proper" - those involve judging the *reasons* for that goal - those judgements are a different thing altogether, and highly debatable.
So did the US military achieve its goal, as set forth by the politicians, in Iraq?
SO far, "yes" is the resonable answer.
As to is it WHY they went after that goal, thats a debate for elsehwere - its a different question.
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You are both completely right and I am wrong. The scary thing is that I am usually the one pointing out that Iraq is a modern state and [was until US occupation] secular. Re-reading my post I can see that I'm misguided even without your replies. Now I have to reassess just how very difficult it is to avoid picking up the prevailing misconceptions of your society.
I can't edit my comment, so I hope that lots of other people have read your rebuttals. Thanks!
-H.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
but can't we either control them 100% or if not, just keep them shutdown and force locatable landlines to be used instead?
You do realize of course that the "war" with Iraq is over and we are currently in a joint peacekeeping operation with the Iraq government. To do any of this we would have to get the governments approval. Yea that would go over like a lead brick..