Friday, December 17, 2010
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
India: India’s Maoist Menace
“We do not have the forces to move into areas occupied by the rebels,” Home Secretary Gopal K. Pillai told India’s Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses in March, according to media reports. “We have a long, bloody war ahead. It is going to be a long haul, and I see violence going to go up.” Pillai declined to comment for this story.
Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram told chief ministers of Maoist-hit states on July 14 that the federal government will strengthen security forces and provide better roads, schools and health care in areas where Maoists operate. Maoists have some degree of influence in 220 of the nation’s 626 districts, the government estimates.
India’s failure to defuse the conflict is another setback as it struggles to become a Western-style power. The nation must spend $1 trillion to improve living standards and infrastructure from 2012 to 2017 for its $1.2 trillion economy to grow at close to 10 percent, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said on March 23. Growth has averaged 8.5 percent a year in the past five years.
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I want to thank one of my readers for sending me some scoop on the situation in India. He had sent me an article from the Economist originally, and I went into research mode due to how interesting this conflict was. This article from Bloomberg was a little better, and very extensive, so I will put this one up. Both articles cover the same subject.
The areas that I like to look at with conflicts, is the position of the insurgency and what economic forces are at play. Specifically, resources that are at stake which could significantly help out a country. Especially if that country’s success will positively help out the free world, and help to provide some balance in the global economy (China needs more competition to keep it in check). India is a democracy, and I sure would like to see it succeed as a democracy. I am no fan of Maoists and the communist game plan, and what they are doing in India and places like Nepal are troubling.
The other thing my reader mentioned, which kind of falls in line with the market of force principles I was talking about earlier, is why do we continue to send money to countries and not offer the services of PMC’s? If India does not have the manpower or COIN capability, then why are we sending money to them so they can somehow ‘re-invent the wheel’ of counter-insurgency? Why not tell them ‘hey, we will help you out, but because we do not have troops to spare, we will send PMC’s’? At least with that arrangement, the money we give to India would instead be going into the pockets of our own companies who would be assisting India in their fight against Maoists.
The best analogy I have for this, is that if you see a homeless man on the street, is it smarter to give them money, or give them an assistant who can clean them up and teach them to fend for themselves? Feed a man a fish, and you feed them for a day, teach them how to fish, and you feed them for life. So the saying goes.
We could be sending companies who can teach the latest counter-insurgency methods and strategies, or even tap into our market of force that is certainly experienced in dealing with insurgents in today’s wars. Companies could be contracted to clear, hold, and build districts that India has lost or is losing too the Maoists. The return on investment in contracting the services of a company to do this for India, would be far better than just throwing money at the ‘homeless man’. Isn’t India’s success within the free world’s best interest?
Because as it stands now, the way the west throws around aid to places like Pakistan or even India seems to never offer a good return on investment. It’s as if we are giving money to that ‘homeless man’ so he can go buy booze with it. lol Besides, wouldn’t it be nice to actually put that money back into the pockets of those who would go back the US or UK, and spend it at home? Is it better to feed them a fish, or teach these countries how to fish?
I also look at how a vibrant steel/mining industry could actually help a government to help it’s citizens. From the jobs it would produce, to the infrastructure the government can improve on, to invigorating the pride of a nation because it is actually doing well. All of this is important for a country to evolve and do well, and especially during a global recession. It does not evolve or do well, when a country is limited by an ideology that a few seem to think is the path. Might I also add that the drug cartels, al qaeda, the taliban, al shabab are all using guerrilla warfare/modern insurgency/4th gen. warfare methods (which relies on much of what Mao thought up), and certainly these groups do not have any kind of moral superiority or world wide support for their cause. I mean who supports the Maoists in India or Nepal? lol
Although I will put this out there for thought. A government, no matter it’s design, must always seem like a good idea to it’s citizenry. If it is thought of as corrupt or ineffective, or they are not able to show progress and true security for the people, then they will be fighting an insurgency (whatever that might be) that will only increase in size and influence, and possibly become victorious. –Matt
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By Mehul Srivastava
Jul 29, 2010
Armed rebels hold the Red Corridor, a region the size of Portugal, in their grip. The nation’s mineral wealth and 8.5 percent annual growth are at stake.
At the heart of the Bailadila Hills in central India lie 1.1 billion tons of raw ore so pure and plentiful that half a century after miners first hacked at it with pickaxes, it remains the richest, and one of the largest, iron deposits on the planet.
Essar Steel Ltd. built a plant near the hills in 2005 to turn the ore into a liquid. The Mumbai-based company, controlled by billionaire brothers Ravi and Shashi Ruia, added a 267- kilometer pipeline to pump the slurry to the east coast, where Essar makes steel.
Yet on this quiet June day, cobwebs hang on rusted pipes in the all-but-abandoned facility, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its September 2010 issue. Caretakers prepare to switch truck-size rock crushers out of their coma, rousing the machines for five minutes a month to ensure they still work.
Maoist rebels from the surrounding Dandakaranya forest armed with guns and explosives — and some wielding axes and bows and arrows — attacked the facility four times in little more than a year, officials at the now-mothballed plant say. They burned 54 trucks waiting at factory gates in April 2008 and damaged part of the slurry pipeline, the world’s second longest, in June 2009. Essar idled the plant that month.
Friday, August 6, 2010
Building Snowmobiles: Using Economic Theory To Predict Enemy Strategy?
“It is clear that war is not a mere act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political activity by other means.” Karl Von Clauswitz
“What is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy’s strategy.” – Sun Tzu
First off, I want to mention that this post is the product of one of my reader’s ‘a ha’ moments. What really makes this cool is that this reader is a fan of the ‘building snowmobiles’ posts on FJ and this was him putting together these random pieces and creating something out of all of it. He had attended a college course years back that covered economic theory, he is well read on the war and a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, he had read Feral Jundi and knew how fun analysis and synthesis can be, and then finally stumbled on some recent news about the war and Taliban strategy, and put it all together. And this is me trying to assemble the thing based on his instructions, and I am thoroughly enjoying myself.
Simply put, this is about using economic theory as a potential tool to predict enemy strategies, so you can defeat those strategies. Because like Sun Tzu says, it ‘is of supreme importance to attack the enemy’s strategy’. Of course I am not going to go all out and say you can predict with 100 percent certainty what your enemy will do. Still, the closer you can get the better, and these are potential tools you can use for predictive analysis.
In this exercise, we will use Afghanistan and the current war against the Taliban there. At this time, we are also using a counter-insurgency strategy. The Taliban are considered the insurgents in this case, and they too are using a insurgency type strategy. Both strategies are heavily influenced by gaining the support of the population. Famous counter-insurgent David Galula had this to say about counterinsurgency:
The aim of the war is to gain the support of the population Galula proposes four “laws” for counterinsurgency:
1.The aim of the war is to gain the support of the population rather than control of territory.
2.Most of the population will be neutral in the conflict; support of the masses can be obtained with the help of an active friendly minority.
3.Support of the population may be lost. The population must be efficiently protected to allow it to cooperate without fear of retribution by the opposite party.
4.Order enforcement should be done progressively by removing or driving away armed opponents, then gaining support of the population, and eventually strengthening positions by building infrastructure and setting long-term relationships with the population. This must be done area by area, using a pacified territory as a basis of operation to conquer a neighbouring area.
Galula contends that:
A victory [in a counterinsurgency] is not the destruction in a given area of the insurgent’s forces and his political organization. … A victory is that plus the permanent isolation of the insurgent from the population, isolation not enforced upon the population, but maintained by and with the population. … In conventional warfare, strength is assessed according to military or other tangible criteria, such as the number of divisions, the position they hold, the industrial resources, etc. In revolutionary warfare, strength must be assessed by the extent of support from the population as measured in terms of political organization at the grass roots. The counterinsurgent reaches a position of strength when his power is embedded in a political organization issuing from, and firmly supported by, the population.
I wanted to put this out there first as one of the main definitions of COIN, so we have somewhere to start.(most strategies are population-centric) In this war, we are basically fighting for the support of the people, and you could easily say that this is politics with guns. You could also say that both sides of this conflict are selling to the population that they are a better idea and friend than the other guy. The Taliban use their methods to achieve population support, and we use ours. In other words, we are in the business of politics in this war. We are trying to win votes or popularity, and like politicians, we are finding all and any way to win as many votes as possible.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Afghanistan: Afghanistan’s Gray Line: The Education of “Combat Platoon”
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Military News: The Marine Corps Lioness Program and Counter-insurgency
Cool program and glad to see it having an impact. I have never heard of such a thing, and this is certainly some out of the box thinking on the part of the Marines. Maybe the companies out there should work to hire a few female security contractors in order to have this kind of capability out there? Especially if you could get a few of these Lioness veterans. Semper Fi. –Matt
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Lionesses work to improve community in local Iraq city
6/12/2009
By Byline Lance Cpl. Melissa A. Latty ,
Unit 2nd Marine Logistics Group
CAMP KOREAN VILLAGE, Iraq —
Female Marines from Combat Logistics Battalion 7, 2nd Marine Logistics Group (Forward), have been participating in civil affairs missions with the Civil Affairs Group 10, 2nd Marine Division for approximately three months in various cities surrounding Camp Korean Village, Iraq.
The women are part of an all-female team called Lioness that was first formed several years ago to implement culturally-sensitive methods of searching Iraqi women to deter the enemy’s use of females to conduct terrorist attacks.
However, Lionesses aren’t just female searchers. In fact, they now do little to no searching at all.