War Nerd's USS Sitting Duck

Today I'm going to talk about war games. Which reminds me: my computer's messed up so I'm writing this column from what has got to be the darkest, smelliest internet cafe in Fresno, not like there are a lot to choose from. I seem to be the only roundeye in the place, and I'm definitely the only one here who didn't come to play combat games.

All around me are these huge explosions and the screams of the wounded, all fuzzy from the cheap speakers beside every machine. I don't even know what games these guys are playing--I don't do fantasy games--but they sure are serious about it.

What's really weirding me out though is the way this Asian guy to my left always ends his game. Every time, there's a huge explosion and then a serious voice saying, "The terrorists win." Every time! Does Homeland Security know about this treasonous game, poisoning the minds of America's yout' with defeatism? And how come the terrorists keep winning?

Which brings me (nice segue, huh?) to the big-boys' war games I wanted to talk about, the ones the US Navy just conducted near the Iranian coast in the Persian Gulf. And I'd like to thank all the readers like Aaron Champion who wrote in to link me to the story and remind me that I've been proven right again. Damn, I'm tired of always being right, because it's always about the bad news. In this case, Aaron wrote to give me the heads-up that six long years after I predicted Iranian irregular naval forces in small civilian craft would make an American fleet in the Persian Gulf look foolish, the glorious NY Times itself lowered itself to repeat today what I'd said way back in 2002. Here's Aaron's message:

Dear Mr. Nerd,

I'm a longtime reader of your column and it wouldn't surprise me if you've already seen this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/12/ washington/12navy.html?ref=todayspaper

But if you hadn't, allow me to stroke your ego (and ego alone) by making pointing out that you're the only motherfucker in the world that seems to have picked up on this. It only took the press five years. Adding insult to ineptitude, it was the New York Times.

Hope this brightens an otherwise bleary in Fuckno for ya.

Aaron

Well, Aaron, it did, kind of. Nothing makes me happier than when the people who get the respect and money I don't get, wind up looking stupid. I just wish the NY Times would pay me some kind of settlement instead of ripping me off six years late. If you're going to steal, fellas, at least do it right. I don't break into your Manhattan HQ to pilfer your back issues for toilet paper, so don't steal my 2002 columns just because your military correspondents are brain-dead from decades of believing DoD briefings.

(Editor's Note: This isn't the first time that the NY Times has lifted from the War Nerd. Last May, the popular Fishbowl/NY blog suggested that Times columnist/editor Nicholas Kristoff plagiarized from Brecher's idea that Cheney must be an Iranian mole because he's doing their business so well.)

If you're a new reader you might need to know that way back in December 2002 I did a column called "U Sank My Carrier!" about the results of "Millennium Challenge," a US Navy war game in the Persian Gulf. Here's the link to that column: http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=6779&IBLOCK_ID=35

What happened in Millennium Challenge is that the Navy brass picked a prickly retired USMC vet named Paul van Ripen to play the Iranian commander facing a naval incursion--and van Riper, with nothing but small speedboats, civilian prop planes, and low-tech surface-to-surface missiles, managed to sink two-thirds of the US force by buzzing them with annoying but not openly hostile civilian craft, then attacking simultaneously with everything he had.

I made two important points in that column. The first is that war's entering a new phase where blurring the line between civilian and military isn't just an accident or cheating but crucial to any irregular force facing first-world attackers. It's how they win.

My second point, the one I got a lot of flak for, was that if we send our old-fashioned carrier battle groups into the Gulf in wartime, they won't come out. They'll make excellent dive sites after all the coral and urchins and other sea critters have colonized them--the Gulf is nice and shallow, so our ships will be resting in really prime diving depth--but they won't come out alive.

Well, durned if the Iranians showed they'd learned from van Riper even if the US Navy refused to. To celebrate the new year, the neocons decided to send another battle group into the Persian Gulf. And guess how the Iranians reacted. Yup: they sent a bunch of small "civilian" speedboats to harass the frigate screen, zipping and zooming in the US Navy's wakes. Waterskiing for all I know, just having a great old time trying to provoke the USN's close-in defense systems into a massacre that they could play for the home audience, tapping into that gigantic Shia lust for martyrdom.

Of course Cheney or whoever else ordered the fleet into a shallow deathtrap like the Gulf was playing the same sleazy game, just with a bigger budget. The only possible reason to send a US fleet close to the Iranian coastline right now is that Cheney and his friends are desperate to provoke a war with Iran fast, before they have to leave office.

And it's harder for them than ever now that we have a new-and-improved Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates. Rummy bought into all their neocon crap--hell, he was their main wizard!--but Gates doesn't. He pissed off the neocons bigtime at a news conference I just read about by calling Iran a "challenge" instead of a "threat." That may not sound like a big deal to you, but to the Admin crowd it's enough to get you burned at the stake, like calling Jesus "a nice man" instead of "my personal savior" to the churchy crowd.

So there's the US Navy trolling the Gulf trying to draw Iranian fire, and there's the Iranian speedboats trying to draw US fire, like a couple of street whores winking at each other. Naturally, no business resulted because they both want the same thing: an enemy provocation. If you're thinking this means the VP was willing to risk US casualties to get his Iran invasion, you're right, but I hope you're not surprised. In the first place, sacrificing a decoy force for strategic purposes is a classic part of war, and besides, the idea of draft dodgers like Cheney caring what happens to an ordinary squid blasted into fish food by a suicide evinrude attack is just ridiculous. They're coldblooded, which is good for a war chief.

Unfortunately they're also stupid. And the Persians aren't. That bears repeating: the Persians are NOT stupid. In fact, they've always been the craftiest people in the Middle East, because they can yell as loud and act as crazy in public as any Arab--but when it's necessary they can also instantly calm down and plan quietly, a smile on their faces and a dagger under the table.

If the Mullahs in Tehran had wanted a provocation, they could have made one phone call and all those annoying speedboats would have beelined for our frigates at ramming-suicide speed. But Persians are patient; they know that Cheney will be gone in a year, so why risk an invasion? Not that they're afraid of a US invasion; in fact, if they were just typical Middle-East crazies, they'd be scheming to get invaded ASAP. But they don't NEED us to invade right now, which means they feel pretty confident things are going their way without any added aggravation. After all, we just conquered Iraq for them; why not let us bleed out there, with no risk to Iran, then walk in when the US Treasury is empty?

So what the Iranians did was waterski around the fleet and drop "boxes in the water." That's a quote from the Navy's report. The Navy seemed especially pissed off about an enemy who'd do something as low and no-account as dropping "boxes in the water." See, every "box" is potentially a mine, and there's nothing that full-braid Naval officers hate more than mines, because of all the ways you can wreck your ship, steaming onto a floating bomb is maybe the most embarrassing.

See, the Navy brass always plans for a neat, clean hi-tech war. Their real investment isn't the Phalanx or Aegis but the operations rooms deep in the hulls where flabby desk jockeys just like me sit at little screens. Those screens are supposed to show a few dots, nice fair-fighting Soviet surface ships and subs. That's how the Navy wants to play the game. Seeing their beautiful screens clogged up by a bunch of goddamn cheap speedboats full of Revolutionary Guards, not to mention hundreds of "boxes" that might turn out to be mines, ruins everything.

You might wonder, if you were real, real naive, why the Navy hasn't tried to learn from what van Ripen did to them six years ago in the same waters. Well, the truth is that no big, well-funded armed service learns or changes until it absolutely has to, which usually means when it starts to lose a war. And of all services, navies are by far the most stubborn, old-fashioned, snobby, retarded of all. I don't mean the submarine force, which is pretty much God. I mean the brass in their ridiculous floating targets, aka carriers, frigates, tankers and other dive-sites-in-the-making.

If they had any sense they'd realize that the way to deal with big overloaded targets is to saturate their defenses with a swarm of low-cost attackers. If you've got lives to spend, and the Iranians sure do, you spend lives to sink hardware. It's a good trade, when you consider what a carrier costs, and how little the average Iranian life is worth. They're Shia! These guys can't wait to give their lives away. The Kamikazes were squeamish moderates compared to the Revolutionary Guard. And thanks to Silicon Valley and its Chinese knockoffs, you can fire swarms of unmanned rockets instead of Shia martyrs, so you don't even need to spend one life per blip on the US fleet's little screens. You can even send empty rocket tubes as part of the swarm, because in the few seconds the surface vessel has to react, it can't determine which threats are nuke, which are conventional HE and which are decoys.

Of course the Navy will come back with buzz words like Aegis and Phalanx. The Phalanx is a good system, if everybody was still playing by those Warsaw Pact vs. NATO war games. Phalanx, for you rookies, is an automated close-in defense system mounted on the decks of USN surface vessels. It looks like that Star Wars robot R2D2, if R2D2 had a huge penis hanging down that was a multi-barrel 20mm cannon. The R2D2 part houses the radar and computer; the gatling gun spits out 20mm rounds at low-flying SS missiles, incoming speedboats, or diving kamikaze planes.

But the Phalanx was never meant to handle swarms of low-tech attackers. That's not the clean, temperate-zone war the computer dweebs in the Pentagon planned for. See, the original Phalanx only had 1000 rounds in its magazine. The newer models have 1.550, meaning even the USN realized that it was too easy to saturate the target with decoy attacks and deplete the magazine. But 1550 rounds isn't much at that rate of fire--and the Achilles heel of the system is reloading. It's not that easy to hoist 1550 20mm rounds into position, and I don't think either van Riper or the Iranians would be likely to agree to a 15-minute reloading break.

If it was me, and maybe I'm too "cynical" or something, I'd send all my empty missile tubes and expendable suicide squads in the first wave, all at once like van Riper did. I'd count to 90, because 90 seconds would be enough to empty every Phalanx magazine--and you can bet that those scared Navy computer nerds down in the Operations Room would be holding the red buttons down till the barrels were melting when they realized they were under a real attack. Then, while the grunts below deck were hauling the ammo into position, I'd send the second wave with the real stuff. And that, as they say, would be that. A trillion dollars of US Navy hardware becomes an artificial reef.

If I'm wrong, US Navy bosses, why don't you show the taxpayers how invulnerable your battle groups are? Bring van Riper out of retirement and give him the Iranian weapons mix, including speedboats, small planes and soviet-clone antiship missiles. Set up an automated frigate somewhere where we can watch, and let us see that Phalanx knock down every single bee in that sting-swarm.

Of course the Navy won't ever stage a test like that. It'd be like asking Benny Hinn to walk on water. You're not supposed to put your god to the test, and Navy brass really do think they're God. Something about all that "tradition" and bullshit etiquette on "the bridge" goes to their heads. You're supposed to trust them. And give them all your money so they can pretend it's still 1880 and the dreadnought rules the waves. Besides, Navy officers were always "gentlemen," and there's nothing as totally useless as a gentleman.

While the Navy was shaking its gentlemanly fists at a bunch of Iranians in Islamic jet-skis, Cheney's propaganda corps was filming the whole ridiculous encounter to try to convince us on the home front that this proved we gotta invade now, right now. This is where they showed that their real talent is for comedy, even though they don't realize it.

To show how dangerous Iran was, the Navy released a tape of a heavily-accented voice on the radio who supposedly threatened the fleet in the Gulf. If you heard this tape, you have to laugh: "I am comink to blow you up, America!" Oooooh, really scary stuff! That's supposed to scare the most expensive naval force in the history of the world?

Some hairy CB retro nut out there in the Gulf whiling away the time sweating in his radio shack hoping to get an answer 30 years after everybody else gave up CB: "Uh, Breaker, Breaker, this is Greaseball Slacker One-Niner givin' y'all the big Islamic word that y'all is about to get blowed up real good, Good buddies!"

To add to the shame, it turns out the voice wasn't even coming from those scary Iranian Bayliners. Turns out the Navy got punked by a dude (or group of dudes) known and hated by every vessel transiting the Gulf under the name "Filipino Monkey."

You know, in some way this whole episode in military history is like one of those samples rappers make. You'd start out with some video of the fleet zooming around the Gulf with the Iranians zipping in their wake in small outboards. You'd run that backwards and forwards a few times while that video-game voice repeated, "The terrorists win!" Then you'd sample the Filipino Monkey's voice that scared the admirals so much, going, "I am comeenk to keeell you America!" a few times, then the apologetic network correspondents saying over and over, "...now appears to be a radio prankster known as 'Filipino Monkey.'" Run that a few dozen times: "Filipino monkey! The terrorists win! I am comeenk to kill you!" Put it on random, switch the order around, zip the video of the fleet at keystone kops speed, and you've got the big picture: the Gulf of Tonkin incident replayed as comedy. That's the world from 1962 to 2008, kids: history repeating, first time tragic, second time comedy. Not good comedy--Cheney's no Henny Youngman--but definitely slapstick.

-Jacked & Hacked War Nerd aka Gary Brecher

Enhance Enough

First out, two enhancers:

Darpa Pursues Neuroscience To Enhance Analyst, Soldier Performance

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) is researching how computers reading brain waves may one day speed up the ways intelligence analysts detect targets in satellite images and also alert platoon leaders when soldiers are losing situational awareness.

The NIA project aims to help the intelligence community deal with the growing problem of having an enormous amount of “visual media” flowing in for review. It is currently taking the analysts too long to turn the data into usable information that can be acted on by decision-makers and war fighters. (Excerpt from Aviation Week)

AND

Psyche 'armor' is a must for soldiers

The Psychological Kevlar Act of 2007. Clever, right?

Made-up? No.

It is the Pentagon's plan for protecting combat soldiers from the psychological trauma of warfare. It entails giving the troops propanolol, a heart medication with an unusual side effect: It minimizes traumatic memories.

Sen. Patrick Kennedy (D-R.I.), introduced the bill last summer. It hasn't moved very far since then, but it's out there. It calls for the Secretary of Defense to develop a program aimed at reducing post-traumatic stress disorder and "other stress-related psychopathologies."

Propranolol is used to treat high blood pressure, heart conditions and circulatory problems.

But, researchers have discovered that it lessens the intensity of unpleasant memories. Here's how it works: Adrenaline is triggered during traumatic or intense experiences, which is why they remain so intense in our memories. Studies indicate that adrenaline administered after an experience - any experience - boosts one's memory of that experience. Propranolol blocks that.

Everyone knows that post-traumatic stress disorder affects a huge number of combat soldiers. In fact, CBS reported that in 2005, 6,000 veterans of all wars committed suicide. That's a rate of 120 … per week.

This is more than a problem. It's an epidemic that is careening through our military ranks.

Maybe propranolol is the solution. If it will save lives and improve the quality of them, perhaps the Psychological Kevlar Act is actually a good idea. (Excerpt from the Buchtelite)

And now the party pooping non-enhancer.

Psychologist Jeffrey Kaye resigns from the American Psychological Association over differences with their policies allowing psychologists to aid in coercive interrogations. The following is his resignation letter:

January 27, 2008

Alan E. Kazdin, Ph.D.
President, American Psychological Association
750 First Street, NE
Washington, DC 20002-4232

Dear Dr. Kazdin,

I hereby resign my membership in the American Psychological Association (APA). I have up until now been working with Psychologists for an Ethical APA for an overturn in APA policy on psychologist involvement in national security interrogations, and I greatly respect those who are fighting via a dues boycott to influence APA policy on this matter. I hope to still work with these principled and dedicated professionals, but I cannot do it anymore from a position within APA.

Unlike some others who have left APA, my resignation is not based solely on the stance APA has taken regarding the participation of psychologists in national security interrogations. Rather, I view APA’s shifting position on interrogations to spring from a decades-long commitment to serve uncritically the national security apparatus of the United States. Recent publications and both public and closed professional events sponsored by APA have made it clear that this organization is dedicated to serving the national security interests of the American government and military, to the extent of ignoring basic human rights practice and law. The influence of the Pentagon and the CIA in APA activities is overt and pervasive, if often hidden. The revelations over the constitution and behavior of the 2005 Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS) panel are a case in point. While charged with investigating the dilemmas for psychologists involved in military interrogations in the light of the scandals surrounding Guanatamo’s Camp Delta and Abu Ghraib prison, it was stacked with military and governmental personnel, and closely monitored and pressured by APA staff.

I strongly disagree with APA’s current position on interrogations, and am unimpressed with recent clarifications to that position that allows for voluntary non-participation in specifically defined cases where torture and abuse of prisoners is proved to exist. I have discussed my reasoning for this elsewhere, both blogging on the Internet and in public. In 2007, I was a panelist in the “mini-convention,” which examined the dispute over interrogations held at the APA Convention in San Francisco, presenting my findings on secret and non-secret psychologist research into isolation, sensory deprivation and sensory overload.

I will briefly review my objections to APA policy and practices, then place them in the context of current APA institutional objectives and goals. I find the latter to be antithetical to the ideals of an ethical and beneficent organization promoting psychological knowledge and practice.

*** APA’s position on non-involvement in torture allows psychologists to work in settings that do not allow the basic right of habeas corpus, in addition to practices of humane confinement as delineated in the Conventions of the Geneva Protocols and various international documents and treaties.

*** APA maintains in private communications that relegating various modes of psychological torture (sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, isolation) and the use of drugs in interrogations to something less than outright prohibition in recent APA position papers does not mean APA had any intention of providing a “loophole” for interrogators in the practice of coercive interrogations. APA also promises to clarify its position on these matters in an “ethics casebook.” When it has found it exigent, as on the PENS resolution, to step outside normal procedure to clarify its position, it has done so. I find it noteworthy that recent APA clarifications of its position are treated as something requiring less than direct organizational expression.

*** APA continues to propagate a position that it knows is not true, specifically that psychologists operate in interrogation settings to prevent abusive interrogations. While sometimes citing the compelling conclusions about context and behavior outlined by Zimbardo, and stemming from his famous Prisoner Experiment, it twists the representation of this research by making psychologists into a quasi-police force monitoring abusive interrogations. On the contrary, the Zimbardo research leads to a more unsettling conclusion, i.e., that human beings in general are susceptible to participation in abusive behavior based upon contextual factors. In fact, the Zimbardo research argues, as Dr. Zimbardo himself has done, against participation in these kinds of interrogations.

*** APA has shown precious little interest in the many revelations regarding psychologist participation in torture, or in psychologist research into abusive or coercive interrogations. Excepting only a brief period in the late 1970s, when widespread and public exposure of CIA mind control programs raised considerable scandal, APA has shown little inclination to confront the history of psychologist participation in such research, nor of its own institutional role in this research.

*** Finally, recent APA activities, such as the joint CIA/Rand Corporation/APA July 2003 workshop in the “Science of Deception,”point to questionable current participation in unethical practices and illegal governmental activities. I queried relevant actors and APA leaders as to what actually occurred at this workshop, which the APA Science Directorate described as discussing how to use “pharmacological agents to affect apparent truth-telling behavior?” Also considered was the study of “sensory overloads on the maintenance of deceptive behaviors,” with workshop participants asked, “How might we overload the system or overwhelm the senses and see how it affects deceptive behaviors?” I never received any answer from relevant APA personnel, including the current director of ethics, about what was going on at this workshop.

The latter episode captures the terrible trap into which APA has fallen. When making agreements with state intelligence and military agencies, it is usual that secrecy agreements are signed. This makes it impossible to reasonably assess and monitor the activities of psychologists in national security settings. Furthermore, the subordination of military psychologists to the chain of command of the armed forces also allows for ineffective if not impossible oversight of psychologist activities. But the problem with secrecy does not end there. Major researchers, including even a former APA president, who contracted with the government, or had their work utilized by the military, as for the latter’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape or SERE program, have told me they are unable to discuss matters beyond a certain point, or tried to restrict discussion of these matters, no doubt due in part to secrecy restrictions. Summing up this point, governmental secrecy and scientific enterprise are in direct opposition to each other, and secrecy negates the promise of effective oversight, not to mention the distortions it renders upon the scientific process itself.

In the recently APA published book, Psychology in the Service of National Security (APA Press, 2006), the book’s editor, A. David Mangelsdorff, wrote, “As the military adjusts to its changing roles in the new national security environment, psychologists have much to offer” (p. 237). He notes the recent forward military deployment of psychologists, their use in so-called anti-terrorism research, and assistance in influencing public opinion about “national security problems facing the nation.” L. Morgan Banks, himself Chief of the Psychological Applications Directorate of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command, and a member of the controversial PENS panel, wrote elsewhere in the same book about the “bright future” (p. 95) for psychologists working with Special Operations Forces. Never mind that SOPs have been implicated in torture in Afghanistan, including receiving instructions in such coercive procedures from psychologists from some of the same psychologists, by the way, that attended the APA/CIA workshop noted above.) Nowhere could I find in the entire book a discussion of ethical problems surrounding these issues, nor certainly of political and social questions implicit in such outright support of governmental initiatives and military policy. Additionally, and curiously, there is no discussion of psychologist participation in military interrogations anywhere in the book.

In my opinion, and despite the otherwise notable and positive stances and activities of APA on other aspects of social note, such as work against prejudice against gays and lesbians, or against race prejudice, it is an unfortunate but urgent fact that APA as an institution has become subordinated to the state when it comes to military matters. In other words, when it comes to interrogations and psychologist military activities in general, APA acts as an arm of the Pentagon and a support agency for the CIA. The differences around interrogation policy APA has with the Bush Administration is itself a mirror of differences with the administration itself, and within different governmental departments. In such instances, APA acts as the instrument of one or another faction within government, but not as an independent actor and representative of the profession and its ideals and goals.

I would suggest the following remedies, if any are still possible, in turning around the degeneration of APA into a willing instrument for U.S. military and intelligence interests:

1. A full opening of all APA archives related to research and participation in activities with the military, including its intelligence arms; and a call for the government to declassify all documents related to the same;

2. The disestablishment of Division 19, the Society for Military Psychology, from the APA;

3. The immediate recission of APA’s Ethics Code 1.02, which was changed from earlier formulations in 2002 to permit adherence “to the requirements of the law, regulations, or other governing legal authority” when there is otherwise a conflict between the law and psychologists’ ethical practice. Opponents of 1.02 have rightly compared it to the Nazi defense of “following orders” at Nuremberg;

4. A call for the formation of a civilian, cross-disciplinary investigatory panel to examine the past history and current collaboration of scientific and medical professionals with the government, especially its military and intelligence agencies, to encompass fields as diverse as psychology, anthropology, linguistics, and sociology, with a goal of producing recommendations on interactions between government and the scientific and medical communities;

5. A moratorium on research into interrogations;

6. Sever the link that ties APA’s definition of “cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment or punishment” in its various resolutions from the Reagan-era Reservations to the UN Convention Against Torture, which seeks to weaken that definition by relying on suspect interpretations of U.S. law rather than international definitions;

7. The immediate cessation of all support for involvement of psychological personnel in participation in any activity that supports national security interrogations.

The sordid history of American psychology when it comes to collaboration with governmental agencies in the research and implementation of techniques of psychological torture is one that our field will have to confront sooner or later. In a larger sense, the problems I have presented here are inherent in a larger societal dilemma regarding the uses of knowledge. This problem was recognized by the first critics of untrammeled scientific advance, and represented powerfully by Goethe’s Faust, and Mary Shelley’s Doctor Frankenstein. Human knowledge is capable of producing both good and evil. The scientist, the scholar, and the doctor hold tremendous responsibility in their hands. That they have not shown themselves, in a tragic number of instances, to ethically wield or control this responsibility has meant that the 21st century opens under the awful prospect of worldwide nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare, while a sinister, behaviorally-designed torture apparatus operates as the servant of nation-states wielding these awful weapons of mass destruction.

It’s appropriate that I close with a statement about the problem of serving powerful national interests from a former president of the APA, a leading and important pioneer in our field, and also, for awhile, a member with top secret clearance in the CIA’s MKULTRA mind control program, Carl Rogers. One wonders, along with the authors of a recent study on Dr. Rogers’ CIA collaboration (see Demanchick & Kirschenbaum (2008), Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 48, pp. 6-30), if Rogers’ exposure to the world of secret government military projects didn’t inform his feelings about psychologists and government, as expressed in his famous debate with another seminal psychologist, B. F. Skinner:

?To hope that the power which is being made available by the behavioral sciences will be exercised by the scientists, or by a benevolent group, seems to me a hope little supported by either recent or distant history. It seems far more likely that behavioral scientists, holding their present attitudes, will be in the position of the German rocket scientists specializing in guided missiles. First they worked devotedly for Hitler to destroy the U.S.S.R. and the United States. Now, depending on who captured them, they work devotedly for the U.S.S.R. in the interest of destroying the United States, or devotedly for the United States in the interest of destroying the U.S.S.R. If behavioral scientists are concerned solely with advancing their science, it seems most probably that they will serve the purposes of whatever individual or group has the power. (Rogers & Skinner (1956), ‘Some issues concerning the control of human behavior. A symposium.’ Science, 124, p. 1061.)”

Sincerely yours,

Jeffrey Kaye, Ph.D.
San Francisco, CA

(H/T Stephen Soldz of Psyche, Science, and Society)

The Unbearable Lightness of Cyber-Threat Iconophiles

...read a top notch, iconoclastic article by Michael Tanji out of Haft of the Spear. I doubt not that it will be misunderstood by more than a few, less of course our seasoned and skewed regulars. Shucks - but what's new 'bout that?

I’m tired of hearing about all the “new” things going on in the cyber-war, cyber-terrorism, cyber- insert- your- term- here business. Nothing I’ve read on these issues in the last few years is any different from anything I read fifteen years ago. Issues that make headlines today were actually new when the IBM XT was a hot piece of hardware. So as a public service your author provides you with five factors to evaluate when deciding on whether or not to buy the next book or magazine with an article that suggests iDeath or e-horror is imminent. Take a pass if you detect any two in a scan of the dust jacket or lede.

Nothing is New. Any time someone talks about how new a given cyber issue is, watch out for wet paint. Winn Schwartau’s 1994 book Information Warfare was essentially the tipping point for the cyberspace-is-a-dangerous-place genre. Years earlier Cliff Stoll’s The Cuckoo’s Egg laid out what evils were in store for the nascent Internet (contrary to popular opinion, Latvia is just the latest target upon which Russian’s have unleashed hackers). Phishing and man-in-the-middle attacks are just variations on a theme; Computer Capers (© 1978!) talks about how people were using computers to commit financial crimes back when a portable computer required a fork lift.

More Metaphors = More B.S. Any story you read that has someone fusing a lot of physical-world terms with Internet-related terms should invoke one reaction: check your wallet. The military are particularly egregious abusers in this area. After years of studying the issues, the Pentagon still has few sound ideas about how to fight and win a battle in cyberspace. That hasn’t stopped the Air Force from setting up new cyber warfighting command (watch for the other Services to follow the money). Among the many unanswered questions: If we are about to launch an attack, do we have to get fly-over rights from Verizon? If an apparent foreign source takes out a purely commercial concern in the US, do we attack said foreign nation’s capitol? Since accurately identifying the source of a cyber attack is near impossible, how do we minimize friendly-fire or collateral damage? Scratch beneath the surface and you find no solid answers.

Net-centricity is as dangerous as it is helpful. Data is not knowledge and being able to process a lot of data does not provide wisdom. Careless application of technology – particularly in a military context, though you find parallels in business as well - threatens to send us into a retrograde spin to the days of the “squad leader in the sky.” The phrase refers to the practice of some military commanders in Viet Nam who would fly above an operation and attempt to direct action on the ground (much to the dismay of those who were actually being shot at). Does having a lot of data on a dashboard fundamentally improve our ability to make decisions, or does it simply foster the illusion of situational awareness and operational control? More importantly, how wise is it to pursue such efforts given the fact that we can barely secure the networks we have now?

The “Expert” Probably Isn’t. Who do you see quoted in stories about cyber-Armageddon? Sometimes they’re white hat hackers, sometimes engineers, sometimes soldiers, but more often than not they’re people who know a lot of buzz-words and not a lot of details. I belong to a professional organization that addresses issues related to conflict in cyberspace, but there is no one in this diverse and august group who knows it all - and more importantly they would never pretend to. Being able to crack passwords doesn’t make you a digital soldier; an ex-pilot assigned to an INFOSEC job while awaiting retirement is no cyber-warrior; and a General who read Strategic Warfare in Cyberspace isn’t the information age’s Sun Tzu. The “expert” who sounds like an evangelist on this stuff isn’t a holy man; he’s a con man.

The World Doesn’t End if the Internet Goes Dark. Cyberwar breaks out tomorrow and then what? The sun will still come up and life will still go on. Everything will become more tedious and time-consuming, but for those raised in the analog age, life will seem very familiar indeed. This is not to say that there will not be economic and other implications that will hurt us as a nation, but we’re not facing life in a new dark ages or a war against the CHUDs. Coloradans dealt with the snow storm of 2007; New Englanders dealt with the ice storm of 1998; levels of individual preparedness vary, but the country doesn’t suddenly become one big post-Katrina New Orleans (especially since New Orleans post-Katrina wasn’t as bad as some made it out to be) just because connectivity drops off.

Lector Caveo should be your watchwords every time you pick up a book or magazine that purports to tell you something you don’t already know with regards to the hazards of cyberspace. Variations on well-worn themes are as multitudinous as there are bits stored on a 40 TB RAID. There is nothing revolutionary about coming up with a new way to waste money on an old idea dolled up in lipstick and pancake makeup. Threats in cyberspace are real, but what is actually scary is the fact that we readily rush headlong to expose ourselves for convenience or merely for cachet. Done properly technology should enable us to do things effectively and safely, but since security is hard, people are lazy, and hope is cheap; we usually end up hoping for the best. We’re in our second decade of cyber threats being on the national security radar and we are still not dramatically better off today than we were when we started. For an issue that should be moving at Internet time, we are still clearly operating at the speed of government.

===
Thanks to Rick Forno, Bob Gourley, and Joel Harding for their help in putting this together. All the good parts are theirs; all the bad parts are mine.

Article jacked from Michael Tanji over at Haft of the Spear.

Law Enforcement, National Security and Climate Change

Might we all pretend that Monday Coming referred to today? Thanks!

The world's wealthiest countries could face the beginnings of societal breakdown by mid-century in the form of boiling domestic unrest over climate change according to the security think tank Oxford Research Group's new report An Uncertain Future: Law Enforcement, National Security and Climate Change [20-page pdf].

A tide of protest against polluting companies and perceived government inaction and, in extreme cases, the emergence of new forms of ecoterrorism are among scenarios outlined by the Oxford Research Group.

The report sounds a warning quite different from the conventional assumption that carbon-induced global warming could trigger waves of environmental refugees from abroad driven by the quest for food, water and shelter.

Most analysis of global warming focuses on the potential for security threats from `over there' in the form of mass migration. That may well be the case but the report's research indicates that there is a range of potential threats from civil unrest within the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States – all the Western nations, in fact - and these threats are seen as growing more acute over time, if governments continually fail to protect us from climate change.

The Oxford report calls on Western governments to overhaul their approach to security and disaster planning, with an emphasis on helping police, security and military forces adapt to preventative, rather than reactive, strategies. A conventional strategy of using force to deter unrest, the report says, is doomed to failure.

The report says that, because Europe and North America have a far greater capacity to adapt to rapid climate change, neither continent is likely to engage in climate-related regional conflict predicted in the most resource-depleted parts of the developing world.

What is "almost certain," the report said, is that by 2050 droughts, food scarcity and flooding would trigger the movement of as many as 200 million environmental refugees. The vast majority is likely to flow toward the developed world, said Abbott. But internal migration is also a factor that is likely to come with its own security issues.

Acknowledging that climate change and security is "a young area of analysis," the Oxford report said its predictions are likely to change, for better or for worse, over the coming decades.

Climate change - what an asexy and trés boring topic with which to kick off the new year here. Oh well...

[The report] is based in part on a briefing given by the author to the Australian Federal Police and other law enforcement and defence agencies in Canberra at the end of 2007. It builds on some of the analysis initially laid out in Global Responses to Global Threats (June 2006) and Beyond Terror (April 2007), and is published as part of ORG's Sustainable security project.

Monday Coming

Posting resumes this coming Monday.

Seasoned Greetings

We the meatballs and effwits of Swedish Meatballs Confidential would like to extend joyous season's greetings to you and your next of kin. Thanks for a decent year, friends and fiends.

Afterthought:
What causes opponents to come of their own accord is the prospect of gain. What discourages opponents from coming is the prospect of harm.
—Sun Tzu, The Art of War

The Intelligence Community, 1950–1955

On Dec 21, the Office of the Historian, Bureau of Public Affairs, U.S. Department of State, released a retrospective intelligence volume in the Foreign Relations of the United States series, documenting the development and consolidation of the intelligence community.

The Intelligence Community, 1950–1955 [867-page pdf]:

This volume is organized along chronological lines in one large chapter covering 1950–1955, and a second chapter that includes the key National Security Council Intelligence Directives of the period. The volume documents the institutional growth of the intelligence community during the first half of the 1950s. When Lt. General Walter Bedell Smith took over as Director of Central Intelligence in October 1950, he inherited an agency that was widely believed to have been unable to establish itself as the central institution of the U.S. intelligence community. Utilizing his great prestige, and a national security directive from President Truman, Smith established the multiple directorate structure within the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that has continued to this day, brought the clandestine service into the CIA, and worked to effect greater inter-agency coordination through a strengthened process to produce National Intelligence Estimates. The exponential growth of the national security establishment and of the intelligence community was due to the impact of two factors: NSC 68 (a clarion call for more active containment of the Soviet Union) and the Korean War. The Central Intelligence Agency was called upon to expand the clandestine service, and the intelligence community was required to provide better and more definitive intelligence on the Soviet bloc and China. When Allen Dulles took over as Director of Central Intelligence in February 1953, these pressures continued. By 1955, the general consensus of two commissions appointed by President Eisenhower to review the intelligence effort was that the clandestine service had grown too rapidly and was plagued by poor management. In general, the commission implied that the clandestine service’s growth had come at the expense of the agency’s intelligence analysts.

This volume presented the editors with documentary challenges. The documents used to compile this volume were unique by Foreign Relations standards. Rather than documenting the formulation of foreign policy decisions or important diplomatic negotiations, this volume is a record of high-level policy plans, discussions, administrative decisions, and managerial actions that transformed the intelligence community from its somewhat shaky establishment into a community that collected intelligence worldwide; provided extensive analysis of that intelligence for policy makers; and carried out covert operations, as approved by the United States Government, on a global scale. The intelligence community under President Eisenhower in 1955 was a much more significant player and a more robust bureaucracy than it was under President Truman in the late 1940s. This volume documents that growth and development.

For those who fear that their machine may choke on a document of this size, State also provides a page which permits downloads of the volume in sections.

Ho Ho Ho IO - Maritime Meatballs

Awareness of IO in the shape of deception-/influence-ops (and other PSYOP-ishness) might reasonably be perceived as a rather pertinent knowledge-set for that discerning consumer of news still wary of those special narratives that intermittently pop up and come to ubiquitously permeate the exhaust fumes of every lo-hairlined tele-prompted head intensely willing to console one come dinner time with sponsored clarity on why the world will always turn for yet another day of credit fueled eudaimonia.

Providing an example of a recent IO and how it's resultant narrative was successfully deployed against a targeted public, and leveraged against its leadership, would perhaps not be considered completely out of order given the esoteric contextualizing going on at this site of dubious repute. For some of our regulars, what follows will be but foggy old news. Verily, it is for these bored and lonely degenerates we provide a meager feed of complimentary skankwork.

In varying contrast to the generic authoritarian state, Western democracies are not seldom at somewhat of an initial loss when attempting to adequately control the mass media to shape the perceptions of their citizens when delicate need so demands. In such lieu, the creation of ‘false realities’ has proven to be one of several workable alternatives to the more direct avenues of influence readily available to those most fortunate despots of Myanmar et al.

By manipulating/tailoring events to be appetizing to a rather divinable media, political/soft control of targeted nations becomes, albeit only at fortunate times, a not altogether unachievable goal. To such ends, well-heeled powers will on occasion aim to create indicators – enemy subs or bomb attacks or whatever – though most often dazzling or salacious events to be sure, that are odds-on seized upon by the regularized and unflappable diligentsia of Dorito media for Cheezy-dimensional interpretation and dissemination to the publics targeted for perception shaping - be they of foreign or domestic persuasion.

After World War II, a real hot war in Western Europe appeared increasingly unlikely. Power struggles in democratic countries found new forms at the lower end of the conflict spectrum. In defense of the Western system, the US began to operate submarines to simulate real enemy intrusions into the waters of allies and friends as an instrument to test their readiness and capability - but also to manipulate the mindset of local military forces, governments and populations, as was the case in Sweden.

Following the stranding of a Soviet Whiskey-class submarine in 1981 in a Swedish archipelago, a series of massive submarine intrusions took place within Swedish waters and were widely attributed to Soviet intrusions. Soon the kingdom of Sweden was on high alert for Spetznaz frogmen everywhere (Robert Boyd got it wrong here, save perhaps for his 'probably'). However, the evidence for these Soviet intrusions appears to have been manipulated or simply invented. Classified documents and interviews point to covert Western, rather than Soviet, activity.

Archival material and interviews with retired military officers point to US and to some extent UK PSYOPs. Former US Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger stated on Swedish TV that US/Western submarines operated regularly and frequently in Swedish waters after Swedish-US navy-to-navy consultations. However, the Swedish government or public was never informed. They believed the submarines were from the Soviet Union. These operations allowed the U.S. to shape the mindset of their targeted audience in order to control a state perceived to be wavering on its kinetic commitments.

As the United States and Britain ran a 'secret war' in Swedish waters, the number of Swedes perceiving the Soviet Union as a direct threat increased from 5-10 per cent in 1980 to 45 per cent in 1983. This Anglo-American 'secret war' aimed at exerting political influence over Sweden was a risky enterprise but perhaps one of the most successful covert operations of the entire Cold War.

Viciously hacked & jacked book review of Ola Tunander's The Secret War Against Sweden: US and British Submarine Deception in the 1980's

Do Europeans Speak With One Another in Time of War? Results of a Media Analysis on the 2003 Iraq War

The Reconstructing Democracy in Europe project [a five-year research project with 19 partner institutions and approximately 70 participating researchers across Europe] has published a study comparing the framing in various print media in Europe of the key issues in the period leading up to the war in Iraq.

Do Europeans Speak With One Another in Time of War? Results of a Media Analysis on the 2003 Iraq War [28-page pdf]:

Some might depict this approach as ‘media centric’ – and they are correct. This study deliberately chose mass media discourse - and not discourses of political elites, for instance - as one but not the only possible forum where a public sphere can develop. The main argument for concentrating on mass media is that in modern democratic states opinion-forming with respect to issues of common concern, in which politicians, civil society and media can engage as active speakers, and interested citizens as – at least - passive observers, can no longer function without recourse to the mass media (cf. Habermas 2001: 119). Thus, mass media have a most significant and essential function in mediating these debates and consequently the term ‘European public sphere’ as used in this study means first and foremost a European public media sphere. Another possible, twofold objection to this approach has to do with the particular logic of news reporting in mass media. One argument is that mass media tends to focus on news issues with a national dimension. Granted that news with a national framing tend to be more salient than news with a European one, the question arises how one can measure European communication in mass media that leaves a smaller chance for issues with a European dimension to make the news? As I consider this question not only a theoretical but also an empirical one, I thus want to leave the answer to empirics. In this respect, the findings presented in chapter three (p. 12ff) may come as striking. Contrary to the theoretical supposition, the findings of this media analysis do not point to a dominant national but transnational framing of the run-up of the 2003 Iraq War. As will be shown in more detail later, four out of the five most frequently used and visible frames in national newspaper discourses are used similarly in a transnational dimension whereas only one frame seems to be a characteristic of a national, in this case the British, discourse. So, addressing the issue of a possible data bias from the empirical perspective of this small study, a predominantly national framing cannot be confirmed. A second problem that might arise of the particular logic of mass media is the argument that news reporting in mass media is biased towards crises, problems or ‘negative’ news in general. This assumption may be correct but in my view, it might not pose a particular problem for the research design of this study. The issue of war and intervention was deliberately chosen: Because of its generally contested character, public debates on this issue might exactly lead to the types of debates this study is particularly looking for. Therefore, the argument that news reportage might show a bias towards ‘negative’ events may be correct but not necessarily problematic for this particular study – even the contrary might be the case. To put it simplistically, one could maybe even argue that the stronger public discourse focuses on crises and conflicts, the more ‘beneficial’ effects this might have for the purpose of this study as it raises the likelihood that debates of a more general kind come up that also contain discussions on shared and diverging view points and problem definitions, interpretations of reference, with regard to the issue of war and peace.

(...)

In order to test the difference hypothesis, two American newspapers were included along with the European newspapers. The evaluation demonstrated that the assumption of diverging interpretations in transnational comparison could only partially be confirmed. In other words: in the case of three frames, namely ‘Iraq poses a threat’, ‘United Nations matter’ and ‘US foreign policy is problematic’, it was impossible to provide evidence of a typically European discourse. These interpretations appear with similar frequency in German, British and American media debates, although with small differences. For instance, there seemed to be a more intensive discourse on the subject ‘Iraq poses a threat’ in the American and British press than in German newspapers, while the critical discourse on ‘Iraq poses a threat’ was in turn stronger in the British and German papers. ‘United Nations matter’ was the frame that appeared most frequently. Only in relation to the frame ‘US foreign policy is problematic’ did the paper’s political affiliation play a significant role: in all of the countries, criticism of the United States was reflected more intensely in liberal newspapers. For all the above mentioned three frames, the difference hypothesis could not be proved. However, the interesting finding was that it could be verified for the ‘International Law matters’ frame. Seemingly, this frame reflects a specifically European aspect of the debate on the use of military force in Iraq. Although this interpretation type was indeed found in American newspapers, the frequency with which the legal dimension of the debate was highlighted varies quite considerably between American and European newspapers. In the American press, particularly the conservative Washington Post, this viewpoint plays a very insignificant role.

(...)

It is notable that the frequency with which statements are assigned to [the International Law matters] frame does not exceed the 10 per cent threshold in either of the American newspapers. In the European newspapers, the frequency is somewhat higher in the liberal papers Guardian and Sueddeutsche Zeitung. From the perspective of ‘International Law matters’, passionate positions were taken in German and British newspapers with respect to the use of military force in Iraq. The following quotes are examples:

SZ: The end of international law? Simma: At any rate, this is a fateful hour. But you also have to see that the concern of the world public for international law has never been so pronounced as it is today! (SZ 01.02.2003)

For this reason alone it is impossible to comprehend the position of a number of politicians who interpret the serious consequences referred to in Resolution 1441 as an immediate starting gun for war. (FAZ 06.02.2003)

No, Mr. Blair, there is absolutely no justification whatsoever for an invasion of Iraq. The attempt by the US and UK governments to finesse us into support for a war that is illegal and immoral leaves us with no confidence in our leaders. (Times 12.02.2002)

Britain and the United States are on the verge of launching a ‘19th-century gunboat war’ in the Gulf which will be illegal and immoral, the former defence minister Peter Kilfoyle warned the House of Commons yesterday.’ (Guardian 19.03.2003)

In the New York Times and the Washington Post, by contrast, there are far fewer references to the legal dimension of the Iraq debate. Barely six per cent of all coded references in the New York Times relate to ‘International Law matters’, while the equivalent figure for the Washington Post is only just above four per cent. It was particularly noteworthy that not one single reference was found in the Washington Post reflecting the opinion that the use of military force was not compatible with or was difficult to reconcile with international law. The overwhelming opinion emerging from German and British newspapers, on the other hand, was that there was no legal basis for the use of military force in Iraq.

The Portrait from Iraq - How the Press Has Covered Events on the Ground

A new Project for Excellence in Journalism [Pew Research Center] report examines the content of Iraq war coverage from January 1 through October 31, 2007 -- a time which featured the start of the high-priority "the Surge is working" perception management campaign.

The Portrait from Iraq - How the Press Has Covered Events on the Ground [24-page pdf]:

In what Defense Department statistics show to be the deadliest year so far for U.S. forces in Iraq, journalists have responded to the challenge of covering the continuing violence by keeping many of the accounts of these attacks brief and limiting the interpretation they contain.

And as the year went on, the narrative from Iraq in some ways brightened. The drumbeat of reports about daily attacks declined in late summer and fall, and with that came a decline in the amount of coverage from Iraq overall.

This shift in coverage beginning in June, in turn, coincided with a rising sense among the American public that military efforts in Iraq were going “very” or “fairly well.”

(...)

The study identified five major narrative threads that related to the conditions in the country or the impact of U.S. policy there: the effectiveness of U.S. policy in action (including the surge); troop morale; the stability of the Iraqi government; the stability of Iraq as a nation; the Iraqi people’s views of the U.S. presence. For each of these, the study also determined whether these stories offered mixed assessments, optimistic or pessimistic.

The thread that generated the most coverage (14% of the all the stories studied) assessed the effectiveness of U.S. policy, and these stories tended to be neither distinctly positive nor negative in their evaluation. Four in ten were mixed or balanced, a third were pessimistic and a quarter were optimistic. This was the only one of the themes where mixed assessments outweighed dour.

Many of the stories assessing U.S. policy were also longer, more detailed accounts. Indeed, they represented 23% of the overall newshole studied, a much larger percentage than the number of stories they accounted for. This was the only one of the threads where the accounting by newshole differed noticeably from measuring it by story.

Often these assessments could be quite layered and come from multiple sources. A Los Angeles Times story from August 22, for example, noted that “With the district locked down, life has started to return to the streets.” Yet a few sentences later, the piece added,“But U.S. soldiers say they fear progress could quickly be reversed if their numbers are reduced.” And a few paragraphs following, an Iraqi seemed far less sanguine. “He invited journalists into his bullet-pocked home on condition that his name not be published …‘The Americans are trying, but sometimes they are not here,’ he said. ‘It is hopeless.’”

The next biggest group (8% of stories studied or 84 stories in all) assessed the stability of the country generally, and most of them were pessimistic. Nearly nine out of ten of them (86%) conveyed a dour message about the country’s direction. “I’d never go back … It is a city of ghosts. The only people left there are terrorists,” a 26-year-old refugee told the New York Times in an August 24 account. Just five of these 84 stories suggested any movement toward stability, and seven of them offered a mixed assessment.

(...)

And 4% of the stories studied (43 in all) related to the stability of the Iraqi government led by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. These tended to be negative as well. About three-quarters of these accounts (32 stories) described an unstable, incapable government while just six of these 43 stories suggested growing stability and five offered a mixed assessment.

The last two threads, U.S. troop morale and the Iraqi view of the U.S. presence, each accounted for about 1% of all stories studied. (14 stories on each.) Coverage for both tended to be pessimistic, but the numbers here are too small to reveal much.

(...)

Changing Public Opinion

To what extent has public opinion risen or fallen with changes in the news? At least since June, there seems to be a connection between events on the ground, press coverage and public opinion.

According to survey data from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, there has been a steady increase since June in positive views about how the U.S. military effort is going. In June, only a third (34%) of the public believed the U.S. military effort was going “very” or “fairly well.” But since July, there has been a steady up-tick in that number, reaching roughly half the public (48%) in November.

This change in public opinion coincides closely with the decrease in press coverage of daily violence. As reported above, stories about daily incidents of violence dropped off in July, and remained low through October.

The public opinion also mirrors the nuances in the situation reflected in the reporting. First, the public appears to have taken note of the decline in daily casualties. The percentage of those saying the U.S is making progress in reducing the number of civilian casualties more than doubled from June to November (21% versus 43% in November). The public also sees more progress in defeating the insurgents, rising from 32% in June to 43% in November.

And just as the Project’s content research finds other messages of instability and chaos increasing as daily violence decreased, the public, too, has maintained bleak views about other areas of the war. There has been no real increase in those who sense progress in establishing democracy there (39% in June and September and 43% in November). And, when asked the broadest question about whether the U.S. effort in Iraq will ultimately succeed, the public has remained split with roughly half saying it will succeed and half expecting failure.

Plus ça Change

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

--Hannah Arendt, The Origins Of Totalitarianism

Finding Weakness in Jihadist Propaganda

From a new School of Advanced Military Studies, United States Army Command and General Staff College monograph, Finding Weakness in Jihadist Propaganda [63-page pdf] by Maj. Timothy R. King (USA):

In a practical sense, propaganda is a message derived from the combined functions of the Information, Social and Political systems (PMESII model) [Commander’s Handbook for an Effects-Based Approach to Joint Operations, Joint Warfighting Center, Suffolk Virginia 2006]. Propaganda begins with an idea that “needs propagation” – in other words, an ideology for a movement being led for a social or political purpose. These ideologies are usually derived from the Social or Political systems and are communicated through the Information system. The information system communicates individual messages that describe and sell the ideology – those messages are propaganda. By using the PMESII model, we can follow the path of the ideological messages and see how they affect the conflict. In figure 1, propaganda is illustrated as a combat multiplier for the notional cause. Powerful emotions brought on by social conditions look to politics for justice and relief. Political powers use information to propagate the cause using a variety of themes. The information becomes propaganda – biased, inspirational information – that is physically conveyed by the existing infrastructure such as print, television, computer and word of mouth. The internet allows easy propagation of the message to a global audience. A portion of the global community is influenced enough to provide economic and political support to the cause. Some are inspired to join the movement. Money, recruits and ideology allow the political leaders to continue military operations globally. Domestically, in regions of conflict, propaganda messages simplify the combatant societies’ notional understanding of the conflict, confirm traditional beliefs, reinforce prejudices and sustain hatred for America and its coalition partners. Collectively the messages persuade the populous to support the movement. Propaganda, as a means of persuading, does not utilize all known facts and is therefore, inherently biased. Propagandists typically sacrifice ethical behavior citing that the “ends justify the means”. Categories of propaganda are various as are the techniques used in conveyance.

(...)

According to Cunningham [Cunningham, Stanley B. The Idea of Propaganda: A Reconstruction, (Westport Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 2002)], propaganda is effective not only because it simplifies the information (making is indiscernible to the intellectually lazy) but also because we are absolutely inundated with the messages. There are so many propaganda messages, many appearing as information, the victim of propaganda has little time apply to finding the real truth. Additionally, much propaganda appeals to the prejudices and pre-established attitudes of the recipient. In other words, propaganda tells the recipient what he wants to hear. Preconceived notions and culturally installed biases reinforce propaganda. Propaganda reinforces what we already believe and forms a “safety net” for our norms. It allows us to legitimize our beliefs and it verifies our values are correct. Propaganda allows the individual to think collectively, with safety in numbers. Cunningham suggests that the victims of propaganda have complicity in propaganda. The propagandee is not an innocent victim; he develops an appetite for the emotionally charged messages and, with acceptance, becomes a willing participant in their own oppression. Wartime propaganda feeds on emotions like hate, fear and patriotism – messages that support the individual’s emotions can bolster the passion of the people. Propaganda of all sorts has become so prolific that it becomes difficult to discern where it is and where it is coming from.

(...)

Co-opting parts of the Jihadist ideology may offer a chance to separate some of the loyal supporters of the Jihad. In Islam: The Straight Path [Esposito, John L. Islam: The Straight Path, Third Edition, (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)],Esposito describes the teachings of Muhammad Iqbal. Iqbal, a lawyer in the early 20th Century, rediscovered the principles and values that could be employed in a modern Islamic society. The beliefs of brotherhood and equality of all Muslims was a principle known in Western democracies. He discovered Islamic versions of democracy and parliamentary government. He concluded that democracy was in fact an Islamic idea and the institutions could easily be adapted to Islamic government. This is a perfect theme to use when countering Jihadist propaganda. Not only does this message contribute to modernization of the Islamic world but also provides religious support for this Western idea. Most importantly, it has the potential [to] create ideology thus completing the destruction of the Jihadists’ ideology. “Islamic Democracy” fills the void [as] Jihadist ideology is damaged or destroyed in the war of ideas.

(...)

Based on attacks like the bombing of the Baghdad Book Market, and the doctrine expressed in Management of Savagery [The Management of Savagery, translated by Dr Will McCants, (Harvard University: John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, 23 May, 2006)], it appears the Jihadists need their people to be illiterate and ignorant to Western education. ... Advancements in global communications, internet and satellite television make isolation nearly impossible – especially since most Muslim nations already have the infrastructure in place. Our information operations should exploit this vulnerability by insuring all “Western” information is easily accessible to Middle Eastern computers. Western news, Universities, and databases should be available in Arabic and easily located by Arabic search engines. Computers with links to the modern world should be more and more accessible. Inexpensive computers with wireless connectivity throughout the Middle East will allow Muslims access to an alternative message – that of progress through education and modernization.

'Shadows of the Images': The Allegory of Iraq

The current issue of Strategic Insights [Center for Contemporary Conflict, U.S. Naval Postgraduate School] includes a piece titled 'Shadows of the Images': The Allegory of Iraq, by John Tirman [6-page pdf].

An excerpt:

The Bush Administration’s perceptions of the Iraq War bring to mind Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in The Republic. Nothing illustrates this more than the shadows and echoes brought before Congress in September by General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Their shadow play, whether intentional or not, fails to convey a picture of Iraq that can move us toward stability and (relative) peace.

What was missing from the performance, and indeed from nearly all reflections about Iraq, are two key variables: the scale and effect of the violence that continues to ravage the country, and the role of the neighbors in promoting or stemming violence and instability.

The Iraq Study Group’s report of late 2006 had recommended regional discussions to move toward a solution to the mounting, multipolar violence in Iraq. At the time, the Bush Administration seemed to completely dismiss the ISG’s views, opting instead for the troop surge and benchmarks strategy that, by most independent estimates, has had mixed results at best. Diplomacy remains low on the list of priorities, and the few contacts with neighboring states have been unproductive, indifferent, or hostile. Petraeus and Crocker’s appearances on Capitol Hill brace the Administration’s tendencies to favor military action over diplomacy -- a fraying, old script.

On the role of the neighbors, for example, notable attention is given to Iran, but few others. The activities of Iran in the war, moreover, have the look of a felony indictment rather than an overall assessment. That is, Petraeus and others in the Multi-National Force command have made allegations about weapons coming in from Iran to be used by militias against U.S. troops. “It is increasingly apparent,” Petraeus told Congress, “to both coalition and Iraqi leaders that Iran, through the use of the Qods Force, seeks to turn the Iraqi Special Groups into a Hezbollah-like force to serve its interests and fight a proxy war against the Iraqi state and coalition forces in Iraq.” In the same appearance, Ambassador Crocker, U.S. envoy to Iraq since March 2007, echoed Petraeus’ comment and offered little in the way of other regional actors offering concrete ideas or steps to stabilize Iraq.

Among the maps Petraeus displayed at the hearings was one, “Major Threats to Iraq,” purportedly showing the sources of violence in Iraq. Nearly all identified sources had to do with Iran or their supposed proxies. And all violent actors coming from outside Iraq originate in Syria or Iran. But as Ahmed Hashim, among others, has described in his Insurgency and Counter-insurgency in Iraq, that among those violently fighting the U.S. military and the Iraqi state, “the foreign element is miniscule.” To the extent there is a foreign element, he describes a first wave to be Palestinians from refugee camps, and a second, larger wave of “mostly Islamic militants recruited throughout Europe and the Middle East and then sent to Iraq through the same elaborate human pipeline the mujahideen used to send volunteers to the Balkans, Chechnya, and Afghanistan.” Hashim has noted that a high percentage of foreign fighters caught in Iraq are from Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries apart from Syria, a calculation reflected broadly in other empirical accounts. Nor have the repeated attempts to link Iran to supply of weapons to insurgents to kill American soldiers, particularly roadside bombs or IEDs, been convincing.

None of this is reflected in Petraeus’ or Crocker’s assertions, or those of their superiors in the U.S. Government. What we do see in Administration depictions of the war is a broad and persistent misperception of a chaotic battle environment and chaotic policy processes. “The fundamental source of the conflict in Iraq is competition among ethnic and sectarian communities for power and resources,” Petraeus argued in his testimony. “Foreign and home-grown terrorists, insurgents, militia extremists, and criminals all push the ethno-sectarian competition toward violence. Malign actions by Syria and, especially, by Iran fuel that violence.”

The violence is significantly blamed on outsiders—Iran, Syria, and Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia (another dimly glimpsed force)—rather than on ungrateful, bumptious Iraqis themselves, who are merely engaging in competition for power and resources, or on the coalition forces, a topic discussed below. But these broad depictions of foreign influence make it seem as though the principal activity of the neighbors is to attack Americans and supply the intramural “competition,” which by nearly every independent reckoning would reject as, to put it kindly, an incomplete picture.

Integrating 21st Century Development and Security Assistance

A new CSIS report deals with today's expanded DOD "non-traditional" security assistance programs, including CT capacity building, post-conflict operations, stabilization and reconstruction, and humanitarian assistance missions.

From Integrating 21st Century Development and Security Assistance [61-page pdf]:

The Task Force welcomes DOD’s commitment to building the capacities of vulnerable developing countries to secure their borders and territories and to mitigate the underlying sources of support for terrorism. A review of regional CT programs in Africa suggests that unity of effort remains elusive at the strategic, organizational, and resource levels. There is a lack of coherent strategic vision and authoritative plans to guide identification of critical U.S. government CT capabilities, to rationalize resources across agency boundaries, and to integrate activities in target countries. At the organizational level, there is a persistent structural misalignment between regionally-based Combatant Commands and State Department country-based approaches, complicating the use of either instrument as an interagency platform. Finally, at the resource level, a failure to invest in the civilian CT capabilities required to improve governance and the rule of law, promote economic and social development, and advance public education, results in an overreliance on military instruments in the Global War on Terror

To promote a more integrated U.S. approach to counterterrorism, the Task Force endorses stronger State/DOD joint strategic planning and coordination at the regional level and recommends that DOD, State and USAID present relevant congressional committees with a joint CT security assistance budget, part of the more comprehensive effort requiring increased Executive Branch budget rationalization and transparency. To overcome organizational obstacles to unity of effort, the Task Force calls for more robust cross-staffing at Combatant Commands, the State Department, and USAID; the creation of interagency CT task forces in U.S. embassies; and additional funding and professional incentives for cross-agency counterterrorism training and exercises. To redress funding gaps, the Task Force recommends interagency formulation of country-specific assistance strategies, the establishment of flexible CT accounts for use by U.S. ambassadors, and increased funding for USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives.

The issue of 1206 [Section 1206 of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2006 established a new program that gives the Department of Defense the authority to spend up to $200 million (now $300 million) of its own appropriations to train and equip foreign militaries to undertake counterterrorism or stability operations] funding authority was the most contentious facing the Task Force.

Some members questioned DOD’s competence in conducting non-military security training (as proposed by the administration) and worried about the potential militarization of U.S. foreign assistance. They argued that Section 1206 authority should be repealed and more emphasis placed on reforming the FAA to provide more flexible tools to the State Department for such training purposes. Other members disagreed, arguing that Section 1206 represents exactly the kind of innovative and agile mechanisms required to conduct the global war on terrorism. They also noted the historical inability of other agencies to operate in non-permissive environments. These members generally supported the Bush administration’s request to make 1206 authorities permanent and global, to allow DOD training of non-military counterterrorism elements under the provision, and to create a higher resource ceiling for the program.

The Task Force ultimately concluded that Section 1206 does provide a valuable, flexible instrument to meet unanticipated contingencies and opportunities in the struggle against terrorism. The use of such funds, however, has wider foreign policy implications. Accordingly, 1206 authority should be restricted to time-sensitive, emerging threats, require robust State Department concurrence and joint formulation of projects, and be subject to close Congressional oversight. To maximize the effectiveness of the 1206 authority, which currently requires annual reauthorization, Congress should extend 1206 authority over 3-5 years to foster program stability (rather than making it permanent and global) and allow DOD to carry over unspent funds across fiscal years. It should also permit DOD to use such monies in combat zones or other insecure environments to work with non-military internal security forces that typically fall under the Ministry of the Interior (such as constabulary, border police, counterterrorism forces, and coast guards), subject to explicit agreement from the Secretary of State and intense legislative oversight. Over time, Section 1206 authority should be phased out, replaced by a substantial, flexible cross-government contingency fund (notionally within Foreign Military Financing (FMF)) to support current 1206 activities.

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The Commanders’ Emergency Response Program (CERP) permits U.S. military commanders to use appropriated O&M funds to meet urgent humanitarian and reconstruction needs of local populations in areas where U.S. military forces are operating. CERP currently applies only to Iraq and Afghanistan, with temporary authorities granted to DOD in successive supplemental appropriations covering those wars. The Pentagon regards CERP as a critical force protection and engagement tool, fostering a permissive environment for U.S. forces in SSTR and counter-insurgency operations. Overall CERP has been a reasonably successful instrument at the disposal of U.S. commanders to deliver goods and services rapidly and elicit local cooperation. The Building Global Partnership legislation submitted to Congress would permit commanders to use CERP funds for urgent humanitarian relief and reconstruction assistance to local populations anywhere that U.S. forces are operating.

CERP was created to provide U.S. commanders in Iraq with an instrument to help bring stability to Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion, by providing tangible benefits to the Iraqi people. The initial funding for the program came from the hundreds of millions of dollars in cash discovered by the 3rd Infantry Division and other U.S. forces in the vaults of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist Party. U.S. commanders had been frustrated by their inability, in the vacuum that resulted following the collapse of Iraqi public institutions, to meet massive emergency needs, from removing trash to restoring basic sanitation and public health, distributing rations, and repairing schools. On May 7, 2003, the Coalition Commander issued an order to establish a “Brigade Commander’s Discretionary Recovery Program to Directly Benefit the Iraqi People.” In June 2003, Ambassador Paul Bremer, the newly arrived Administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), gave the program its current name and delegated authority over its use to the Coalition Commander. The establishing memo declared: “This Program will enable commanders to respond to urgent humanitarian relief and reconstruction requirements within their areas of responsibility, by carrying out programs that will immediately assist the Iraqi people and support the reconstruction of Iraq."

Under initial guidance, permissible uses of CERP funds included the building, repair, reconstitution, and reestablishment of the social and material infrastructure in Iraq. This included, but was not limited to, the following: water and sanitation infrastructure, food production and distribution, healthcare, education, electricity, telecommunications, transportation, economic and financial management, the rule of law, effective governance, irrigation systems, civic improvement, and repairs to cultural facilities. Prohibited expenditures* fell into several categories: expenses of direct or indirect benefit of CJTF-7 (including coalition) forces; entertainment of the local Iraqi population; weapons buy-back or rewards program; purchase of firearms, ammunition, or removal of UXO; duplication of services available through municipal governments; support to individuals or private businesses (with some exceptions, e.g., repair of damage caused by the coalition); and salaries, pensions or emergency payments to civil service. Each division commander was provided with $500,000 and each brigade commander $200,000 in CERP funds and instructed to coordinate all projects with regional CPA offices, governorate support teams, and Civil Affairs teams, and to submit weekly expense reports.

* In September 2005, this list of prohibited activities was extended to include “providing goods, services, or funds to national armies, national guard forces, border security forces, civil defense forces, infrastructure protection forces, highway patrol units, police, special police, or intelligence or other security forces”; “training, equipping, or operating costs of Iraqi or Afghan security forces”; and “conducting psychological operations, information operations, or other U.S. coalition, or Iraqi/Afghanistan Security Force operations.”

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Among the uniformed military services, support for the HA [Humanitarian Assistance] mission is strongest within the Marine Corps, light infantry of the Army and National Guard, and the indirect action portion of the Special Operations Forces, which focuses on civil affairs and psychological operations. Among the geographic Combatant Commands, the humanitarian assistance mission has found a receptive audience both in CENTCOM, which is deeply involved in stability and counter-insurgency operations, as well as in the so-called “economy of force” commands, including PACOM, SOUTHCOM, and now AFRICOM, a large share of whose mandate includes responding to humanitarian crises.