Cultural Intelligence – Page 991 – Public Intelligence Blog

Nicht Schwerpunkt as a Prescription for Defeat by a 1000 Cuts

Operation_Barbarossa_corrected_border — Operation Barbarossa

Recent events like the Fort Hood Massacre and the bungled attempt to fire bomb the airliner bound for Detroit have focused attention on and encouraged our escalating intervention in Yemen, which has been taking place quietly, as if Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan were not enough to keep our strategic planners and stretched out military forces occupied. Our reactions to events in the so-called Long War on Terror suggest an aimless spreading of effort throughout the Middle East and Central Asia. This aimlessness brings to mind a comment General Hermann Balck, a highly decorated German officer in WWII, made to a small group of reformers in the Pentagon in the early 1980s. The subject was Operation Barbarossa, or Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Balck pithily dismissed the German strategy shaping that invasion with the words: “Nicht Schwerpunkt.” Balck was saying there was no focus or main effort to the German invasion, and without a focus, there was no way to harmonize the thousands of subordinate efforts. The result was a spreading of effort that led to eventual overextension as can be seen in the following map.

Now the Eastern Front of WWII is very different from the ridiculously misleading label of a Central Front in the Long War on Terror. But the idea of schwerpunkt is germane to both efforts, and the US is showing all the signs of spreading and over extending its efforts which accompany a nicht schwerpunkt.

This is no small thing. As the American strategist Colonel John Boyd showed in his famous briefing, Patterns of Conflict, the idea of a schwerpunkt is central to organizing all effective military operations. It is far more than a simple question of concentrating forces. According to Boyd, the idea of a “Schwerpunkt represents a unifying medium that provides a directed way to tie initiative of many subordinate actions with superior intent as a basis to diminish friction and compress time in order to generate a favorable mismatch in time/ability to shape and adapt to unfolding circumstances.” Now this is a very compressed statement, pregnant with information, and based on a lot of research, but it nevertheless makes it self evident that there is no comparable unifying medium in America's Long War on Terror. Our failure to form a schwerpunkt is just as much a prescription for paralysis and defeat by a thousand cuts in a guerrilla war as it is in a mechanized conventional war between standing armies.

To see why, consider please the following three attachments:

Continue reading “Journal: Yemen–Opening A New “Front” in the Long War”

2009/12/292009/12/29

Journal: ClimateGate 29 December 2009 Morning

Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence

grpahic climate gate — ClimateGate Rolling Update

Hope for a Climate Change Solution in the Wake of Copenhagen — If Governments Can't, People Can

The scale and speed of change required goes well beyond anything political leaders have ever had to contemplate, much less achieve. And even if the political will were there to achieve this level and speed of carbon reduction, the social change 1.0 tools at their disposal — command and control, and financial incentives — are not designed for this type of rapid, transformative change. They were purposely designed over two centuries ago for gradual, incremental change.

. . . . . . .

If command and control and financial incentives are not enough to turn the tide in the necessary timeframe, can renewable energy and new breakthrough technologies come to the rescue of humankind? While a low-carbon future critically depends on new technologies, there is no credible scenario by which they can be brought to scale in the ten-year window within which our scientists tell us we must make major carbon reductions.

The dilemma we face is what systems theory calls second order change — or change that requires a system to transform and reorganize at a higher level of performance. When the easier-to-implement solutions prove inadequate for the speed and magnitude of change required, the system goes into stress and must evolve, or it will break down.

. . . . . . .

A Cool Community also enables a city or town to enjoy the immediate practical benefits of more livable neighborhoods, greater environmental sustainability, and economic development. Furthermore, it creates a robust long-term carbon reduction capability by building the community leadership, carbon-literate citizenry, and political will necessary to sustain this type of change over time.

Continue reading “Journal: ClimateGate 29 December 2009 Morning”

2009/12/282009/12/28

Journal: Evaluating the Gaza Confrontation

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 06 Genocide, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Military, Peace Intelligence

The American strategist and military reformer Colonel John Boyd argued that nations and groups should shape their domestic policies, foreign policies, and military strategies so that they:

pump up one's own resolve and increase one's own solidarity,
drain away the resolve of one's adversaries and weaken their internal cohesion,
reinforce the commitments of allies to one's own cause and make them empathetic to one's success
attract the uncommitted to our cause or makes them empathetic to one's success
end conflicts on favorable terms that do not sow the seeds for future conflicts

These criteria are the essence of grand strategy and can be thought of as guidelines for evaluating the wisdom of specific policies or actions. And while they make sense logically and intuitively, the difficulty of defining policies that simultaneously conform to and strengthen to all these criteria is equally obvious. The latter challenge is particularly difficult for the unilateral military strategies and the coercive foreign policies like those preferred by Israel or the United States. Military operations and political coercion are often destructive in the short term, and these destructive strategic effects can be in natural tension with the aims of grand strategy, which should be constructive over the long term.

Moreover, the more powerful a country, the harder it becomes to harmonize the often conflicting criteria for a sensible grand strategy. Overwhelming power breeds hubris and arrogance which, in turn, carry a temptation to use that power coercively and excessively. But lording over or dictating one's will to others breeds resentment. Thus, possession of overwhelming power increases the risk of going astray grand strategically.

That risk is particularly dangerous when aggressive external actions, policies, and rhetoric are designed to prop up or increase internal cohesion for domestic political reasons. Very often, the effects or military strategies or coercive foreign policies that are perceived as useful in terms of domestic political cohesion backfire at the grand-strategic level, because they strengthen our adversaries' will to resist, push our allies into a neutral or even an adversarial corner, or drive away the uncommitted … which together, can set the stage for continuing conflict.

With these general thoughts about grand strategy in mind, read the following article by Uri Avnery and ask yourself if Israel's most recent war in Gaza made sense at the tactical level of conflict?, the strategic level of conflict? … and most importantly, at the grand strategic level of conflict?

Chuck Spinney

Full Story Online

Cast Lead 2

by Uri Avnery

Antiwar.com

December 28, 2009

Did we win? Sunday marked the first anniversary of the Gaza War, alias Operation Cast Lead, and this question fills the public space.

Continue reading “Journal: Evaluating the Gaza Confrontation”

2009/12/252009/12/25

Search: map of iranian influence in africa

05 Iran, Communities of Practice, Cultural Intelligence

Phi Beta Iota: Extremely cool search! Should be combined with a map of Chinese, Turkish, and Brazilian influence in Africa. OSS.Net, Inc. drew on its European allies to provide the tribal maps for Afghanistan and Iraq to Special Forces prior to their going in, and we are still astonished at the complete lack of a serious geospatial mapping capability focused on tribes, influence, and so on.

Let's start with Iran itself. Below is a map of its own divisions.

graphic iran ethnic — Iran's Ethnic Distribution

So when you talk about Iranian influence across Africa, you want to be very clear about both the ethnic roots of the Iranian influence element at point X, and the tribal-ethnic roots of the African element coming into contact with Iranian influence.

We are long over-due for anthropologically-correct maps of the various diasporas, with China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia being among the most important, the latter because of the extreme corruption of their leadership and the extreme virrulence of Wahabbism.

See the graphic on Africa (7) and also, for excellence of depictions, Atlases & State of the World (21).

Articles:

Iran's activity in East Africa

Iran's Activity In East Africa, The Gateway To The Middle East And The African Continent

Cliick on above for a fine report with good detail dated 7 August 2009. The below images come from that report.

The Iranian regime's activities in African countries

Saudis act to counter Iran's influence in the Mideast – Africa & Middle East

The Iranians have been very active in Latin America during the past ten years, at the same time that the Chinese have been using Macao to launch very deliberate campaigns into all former Portuguese territories.

2009/12/222009/12/22

Journal: TSA Clears Illegal Immigrants To Work At NY Airport–Accepts False ID’s, Grants “Trusted Agent” Full Access

10 Security, Cultural Intelligence, Government

Full Story Online

In the latest of many shameful lapses, the federal agency in charge of securing the nation’s transportation system approved background checks for a dozen illegal immigrants working in sensitive areas of a busy U.S. airport.

The illegal aliens, from Central America and Mexico, worked in operational areas of Stewart International Airport, a 2,400-acre facility located about 60 miles north of New York City. Stewart is a major passenger airport for the state’s mid-Hudson region that also handles large quantities of cargo and serves as a military field.

The illegal aliens all had security badges approved by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the agency created after the 2001 terrorist attacks mainly to protect airlines. The TSA’s national background check failed to detect the fake Social Security numbers and other bogus documents provided by the illegal immigrants to obtain clearance.

So the embattled 43,000-member Homeland Security agency, which has received hundreds of millions of dollars from Congress to fulfill its mission, granted the undocumented aliens “trusted agent” security badges.

2009/12/222010/09/02

Journal: Resources on Terrorism and Jihad

08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, Analysis, Communities of Practice, Cultural Intelligence

A 9/11 in Indonesia: JI's planned aviation attack: info Noordin Top's laptop

Countering terrorist ideology: the ideological response unit (Singapore)

Global (Terrorism) Pathfinder (Singapore)

The ICPVTR Terrorism Database – Global Pathfinder – is a one-stop repository for information on the current and emerging terrorist threat. The database focuses on terrorism and political violence in the Asia-Pacific region – comprising of Southeast Asia, North Asia, South Asia, Central Asia and Oceania.

In addition to providing the latest information on terrorist attacks and pronouncements, Global Pathfinder also includes over a hundred terrorist training manuals, counter terrorism legislations and conventions, analytical papers on terrorist ideologies, commentaries on terrorist trends and patterns, transcripts of landmark cases, interviews with terrorists as well as photographs from different conflict zones across the world. Further, Global Pathfinder also has a huge collection of jihadi websites, the contents of which are routinely translated and analysed by our analysts.

The Global Jihad Network: Why and How al–Qaeda UsesComputer Technology to Wage Jihad

One of the main architects of the new al-Qaeda is a man named Abu Musab al-Suri. He put down his vision for the future of jihad in a book entitled Call for Worldwide Islamic Resistance, a one-thousand six-hundred page manifesto published on the Internet in 2004.

…he sought “…to transfer the training to each house of each district in the village of every Muslim….making appropriate training materials available to more than a billion Muslims….

Systems Approach To Terrorism: Countering The Terrorist Training Subsystem

Celebi's thesis focuses on the use of the Internet both in general and in the case of the Kurdish group PKK. The work is strongest in its discussion of what the author calls the training subsystem, and in his explication of that system as involving more than tradecraft and being increasingly based online. This training subsystem is seen as having four core functions:

1. The training subsystem creates, intensifies and sustains the competence, commitment and the skills that the terrorists will apply to reach their goals.

2. The training subsystem not only teaches the ways and means, but also justifies them by means of intensive indoctrination.

3. The training subsystem establishes ties to the group and creates a sense of belonging.

4. The training subsystem enables knowledge to be stored inside the boundaries of the system, and facilitates its passing through generations.

2009/12/202009/12/20

Journal: Liars & Cheats as “Person of the Year”

Cultural Intelligence

Full Story Online

Hilarious but on target, IMO

Tiger Woods, Person of the Year

OP-ED COLUMNIST FRANK RICH

December 20, 2009

AS we say farewell to a dreadful year and decade, this much we can agree upon: The person of the year is not Ben Bernanke, no matter how insistently Time magazine tries to hype him into its pantheon. The Fed chairman was just as big a schnook as every other magical thinker in Washington and on Wall Street who believed that housing prices would go up in perpetuity to support an economy leveraged past the hilt. Unlike most of the others, it was Bernanke’s job to be ahead of the curve. Yet as recently as June of last year he could be found minimizing the possibility of a substantial economic downturn. And now we’re supposed to applaud him for putting his finger in the dike after disaster struck? This is defining American leadership down.

If there’s been a consistent narrative to this year and every other in this decade, it’s that most of us, Bernanke included, have been so easily bamboozled. The men who played us for suckers, whether at Citigroup or Fannie Mae, at the White House or Ted Haggard’s megachurch, are the real movers and shakers of this century’s history so far. That’s why the obvious person of the year is Tiger Woods. His sham beatific image, questioned by almost no one until it collapsed, is nothing if not the farcical reductio ad absurdum of the decade’s flimflams, from the cancerous (the subprime mortgage) to the inane (balloon boy).