Does it seem to you that there is a shift in our foreign policy-military-terrorism strategy from primarily a COIN approach to more of a mix of COIN, SOF, CT, targeting, HVT’s and UAV’s as the pro-active plan to disrupt, deny and “be-head” the terrorists? Or is it just that there have recently been several top terrorists taken off the field, and many lesser bad guys have been neutralized in this way for months?
The discussion of a possible change in mix of strategies and priorities brings with it several thoughts and additional approaches I’d like to get your thoughts on this week. In this note we quote AP reporter Kimberly Dozier and General Stan McChrystal (Ret.), among others.
*Reporter Kimberly Dozier of the Associated Press, writing October 14th in the StarTribune, in her article “CIA Gives Military Greater Say In Debate, Analysis of Afghan War”, comments:
“the information gave ammunition to those who supported Vice President Joe Biden’s special operations-centered counterterrorism strategy over Petraeus’ backing of traditional counterinsurgency.”
————————————————–
Alex Calvo, in his August 9th article in the Small Wars Journal titled “London Riots: Decentralized Intelligence Collection and Analysis”, comments:
“one of the developments arising from the current riots in the United Kingdom, where a website has been set up so that the public can identify those involved and report them to the Police. The use of modern technology to identify insurgents could be a response to the lack of working censuses in many areas where stability operations are conducted, seen by some observers as a major weakness.”
“the birth of a website devoted to the collection of pictures of the incidents with a view to the identification by the population of those responsible and their reporting to the Police is clear evidence that these same technologies can be employed to deter violent crime. Websites like the one discussed above can plug a gap in the capabilities of security forces, using a decentralized approach to collect and process intelligence, turning the mere collection of thousands of pictures we all have seen in the media over the last few days into useful, actionable, intelligence leading to the arrest of those who thought they could maim, steal, and burn, with impunity.”
The entire Calvo article follows:
“Identifying Occasional Criminal Insurgents
The purpose of this paper is to comment on one of the developments arising from the current riots in the United Kingdom, where a website has been set up so that the public can identify those involved and report them to the Police. The use of modern technology to identify insurgents could be a response to the lack of working censuses in many areas where stability operations are conducted, seen by some observers as a major weakness.
The central idea is to tell friend from foe, or in classical Maoist terminology, fish from the water, using some of the widely available tools which, on the other hand, seem to be used to spread the violence in the UK.
The use of a website to spread pictures of violent incidents and have the perpetrators identified by the population would be a way to plug a gap in police capabilities, since the British authorities are unlikely to have the necessary manpower and knowledge to do so on their own.
This is why we can talk of ‘decentralized intelligence collection and analysis.’
Looking Beyond the Protection of the Population
The current riots in London and other cities in the United Kingdom have led to widespread calls for a wider police presence in the affected areas, and the social media have reflected some of these complaints, featuring stories about flashpoints where the population was left unprotected in the face of what could be described as a combination of urban guerrillas and occasional criminal insurgents.
With the riots still raging, it is obviously too early to draw any in-depth conclusions in terms of policing, and, furthermore, the complex nature of the incidents would make it inappropriate to concentrate on any single factor. It is obvious that the Police cannot be everywhere, and, furthermore, their duty to protect the population is a key organizational weakness of government forces6 in the face of insurgents of any sort.
This forces us to look beyond the protection of the population as a goal, and ask ourselves how to identify those responsible for the violence so that they can be arrested8 and, ideally, those who may join them in the future deterred.
The Challenge of Identifying Urban Guerrillas and Occasional Criminal Insurgents
In past post-conflict stability operations some observers have pointed out at the lack of a population census as a major weakness in attempting to identify the enemy, hidden among the population9. It is one of the capability gaps behind the calls for the deployment of military units with police training and skills.
This is however where we can notice a key difference between London and other British cities currently under siege and the battlefields where our troops have been fighting in the last decade, since the former’s population is already recorded on a number of databases.
We must however be careful before we jump to the conclusion that, given the ample available footage and pictures of the criminals, their identification will be a simple task, to be undertaken at leisure once order has been restored. For the time being, the software tools which may in the future allow the automated matching of pictures to identities are still not available, and the resulting volume of man-hours necessary to accomplish the task is probably beyond the capabilities of the London’s Metropolitan Police Force and other British police forces and security agencies.
To make matters worse, even if such a feat could technically be accomplished, it is not clear whether the resulting intelligence would translate into legally admissible evidence, something that the rioters, or at least some of them, seem to be aware of, judging from the text of a pamphlet found in one of the scenes of devastation in Great Britain’s capital, which among other pearls of wisdom reads ‘Don’t assume that because you can identify yourself in a video, a judge will be able to as well. “That isn’t me” has got many a person off before now.’
A Decentralized Approach to Occasional Criminal Insurgent Identification
It is this problem, the inability of the Police to identify all the participants in the violence and mayhem, that seems to have prompted an interesting grassroots initiative, namely a website where the public can post pictures and look at them in order to identify the participants in the violence and call the authorities. Under the name ‘Catch a Looter,’ the website aims at ‘Collating all images of looters from the London riots.’ and invites readers to ‘contact Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111′ if they ‘ recognise anyone’
The owner of the website is careful to make it clear that ‘This site does not support vigilante action; merely using social media to collate all images in one place,’ and, furthermore, warns that it is ‘Worth mentioning that some of these photos *may* be innocent bystanders who happen to have [been] shopping. It’s not up to me to decide if they have committed a crime; I’m just helping to collate and perhaps provide a central place for these pics’
These statements make it clear that there is no question of replacing the security forces, but rather of aiding them in a task for which they do not have the necessary manpower and expert knowledge: the identification of criminals involved in the rioting and looting.
Unless this or similar efforts succeed, the proportion of rioters arrested will remain low, since the hundreds taken into Police custody to date are but a small fraction of the criminals involved. This will mean, as has been the case in similar instances in the UK and other countries, that crime will pay, given the low likelihood of being arrested and punished.
A Look at the Use of Modern Technology by Criminals and Security Forces
We can conclude by briefly referring to the widespread reports that the occasional criminal insurgents have made extensive use of modern technology to coordinate their actions. Reporting on this, Radio Free Europe stressed the role of ‘Blackberry’s instant message service (BBM) in the riots,’ which, as first pointed out by Blogger Jonathan Akwue, ‘is an instant messenger system that has become popular for three main reasons: it’s fast (naturally), it’s virtually free, and unlike Twitter or Facebook, it’s private.’ This privacy, together with ‘the ability to broadcast messages, which then go to all your contacts, and can quickly go viral,’ seems to be among the reasons for its popularity.
This is yet another reminder that technology in itself is often neutral, potentially aiding both criminals and insurgents on the one hand, and government forces on the other.
In addition to the possibility of fellow rioters gathering to strike at targets, another risk posed by modern communication technology may be disinformation. Reports of false incidents on social networks may have confused first responders and aggravated the lack of boots on the ground.
However, despite all these instances of usage by occasional criminal insurgents and their moral sponsors of modern communication equipment and technologies, the birth of a website devoted to the collection of pictures of the incidents with a view to the identification by the population of those responsible and their reporting to the Police is clear evidence that these same technologies can be employed to deter violent crime. Websites like the one discussed above can plug a gap in the capabilities of security forces, using a decentralized approach to collect and process intelligence, turning the mere collection of thousands of pictures we all have seen in the media over the last few days into useful, actionable, intelligence leading to the arrest of those who thought they could maim, steal, and burn, with impunity.
In a way, this would be a replication of the variable-geometry networks currently destroying Britain’s main cities. Just like all sorts of criminals have joined forces to concentrate, gaining local superiority at their chosen schwerpunkts, mainstream society, the population that the security forces must protect, would also join together, to repel them, providing the authorities with that most valuable of commodities in any struggle of this kind: intelligence. Just like the criminal insurgency networks at large often don’t have overarching leaders, this would also be a horizontally coordinated, not vertically led, effort.
Finally, once these possibilities have been fully explored in largely stable and industrialized societies, it may be possible to adopt some of the lessons to the kind of scenarios where, as rightly pointed out by a number of observers, the inability to identify insurgents due to the lack of a census has hampered stabilization and reconstruction operations in the past.
Conclusions
When faced with widespread urban violence, which we can refer to using terms such as urban guerrilla or occasional criminal insurgency, security forces do not have the capacity to process the graphical information collected in order to identify and arrest the culprits. Since it is practically impossible to arrest them all on the spot, this means that unless an alternative way is found, deterrence will not work, because the chances of being caught will be statistically negligible, thus encouraging participation in future events of the same nature.
The security forces do not only lack the capacity to process all the information collected in the form of video footage and photographs, they are also unable to protect all the population and infrastructure, and trying to do so may only result in being spread even thinner.
Therefore, only deterrence can diminish the likelihood and gravity of future riots, and as a result a way must be found to turn the large amounts of information on the identity of the culprits into actionable intelligence leading to their arrest. The existence of different government databases where the whole population is recorded means that part of the job is already done in advance, a welcome chance from many scenarios of recent counterinsurgency campaigns, but the key linkage of faces to names remains. It is here that the population at large can bridge the gap in police capabilities, by using the Internet.
Although the setting may seem very different, the key question in London and the rest of Britain right now is the same as in almost every insurgency: getting the population to provide intelligence to the government forces, so that they can isolate the insurgents, whatever their exact nature and motivations. Otherwise, hidden among the civilians, they will just wait for another opportunity to strike.”
Alex Calvo is a global economics and international relations professor at European University (Barcelona Campus), and a former teaching and research fellow at the OSCE Academy in Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan). He is a law graduate from the School of Oriental andAfrican Studies (London University).
—————————————————-
The Council on Foreign Relations hosted an HBO History Makers Series Discussion with Stan McChrystal on October 6th, with Tom Brokaw presiding.
In response to a question from the audience, “It’s been publicly reported that Special Operations killed and captured about 12,000 Taliban in the 12 months leading up to the beginning of this year. If that’s correct, which I am sure it is, we now have a new element in COIN doctrine, both Special Ops and drones.”
McChrystal’s reply included these comments:
“You know, there’s a dichotomy that’s drawn sometimes between COIN and counterterrorist operations. And I think it’s absolutely a false one, at least it’s false in the way people do it. If I say counterterrorist operations to most people, they think that’s direct action. That’s either a kinetic strike or a raid by a force. And if we talk about counterinsurgency, we tend to think of hearts and minds. In fact, direct action is part of counterinsurgency, just as reducing the causes is part of counterterrorism. So I’ll talk about direct action as opposed to CT.
We have — we’ve developed an ability over the last decade to do extraordinarily precise operations, both using kinetic strikes from air strikes, or even missiles in some cases and whatnot. And, most importantly, we’ve developed an ability to do targeting — intelligence gathering and targeting much better. Part of that is from full-motion video from aerial platforms. Part of that is signals intelligence. Part of that is human intelligence. And that’s gotten better.
And through some processes where we fuse the intelligence better than we have in the past, still not perfectly, we have gotten to a tactical and even operational level of war, ability to do that at such a speed that it’s unprecedented. We could do it multiple times. We could hit a target early in an evening, and from what was captured on that target, either individuals or material, we could develop and hit another target, and sometimes three in the same night from that, and capture three people. And, of course, the key to that is as fast as you can operate, faster than the enemy force can respond, and the other part is precision.
And the other part I’d make on precision is the reason it’s so important is because, one, you need to get who you’re going after or your credibility drops.”
See the complete McChrystal interview at www.cfr.org/afghanistan/hbo-history-makers-series-stanley-mcchrystal/.
—————————————————–
We’d like to hear your perspectives and ideas about the shift in strategy to less occupation and more special ops, counterterrorism, targeting, high value targets, and the use of uav’s. Do you tie the intelligence acquired only from living in the AO to effective targeting, or can it be done as well without the cost in lives and assets that are involved in occupation? You can comment on the Roundtable at www.lsi-llc.com, or send me a note at john@lsi-llc.com. We’ll share your thoughts with our 5,000 readers.
Thanks,
John