Thursday, June 24, 2010
Building Snowmobiles: Human-flesh Search Warfare
Sinnreich adds a psychological component. “A lot of us really know next to nothing about what’s really going on militarily in Afghanistan,” he says, “so when a schism like this opens up, we think, ‘There must be more to this.’ ” A “collective detection mentality” takes over, he says, and thousands of people start piecing together thousands of bits of information to get a bigger picture.
*****
If anyone is wondering how I come up with this stuff, I will explain. I will read about one interesting concept, store it away in my brain, and then when I hit some trip wire ideas that fit in with that prior concept, some ‘illumination’ occurs. In this case, I was reading about human-flesh search engines a week or so ago, and then the Rolling Stone atomic bomb of a story comes out, and I started putting two and two together.
First, let’s discuss what each component is and then we can discuss how they fit together, and then finish up on how to weaponize the concept (if possible). Because if you look at what happened here, the best general that the US had, second only to Petraeus, was effectively removed from his post, all because of what was said in an article and the flash fire effects of new media. That is one hell of an attack if you could figure out how to reproduce it.
The first part of the concept is the human desire to want to know. And the tools we have available to us these days, give us the ability to ‘know’ what is going on very quickly. The news cycle and people’s ability to get that news, and how it allows us to pass it on to the next guy is mind boggling fast. It doesn’t combust like a fire, it explodes like a bomb, and new media/social media is the facilitator for everyone who wants to know.
For example, when the McChrystal ‘Runaway General’ news came out, I had heard about it via Facebook, Twitter, newsletters, updates via email, and my RSS reader. I also got the news via my iPhone, which means I did not have to wait until I got home to read all of this stuff. The news exploded, and like most, I passed that news on to my network. I then got to work on posting a blog entry about the thing, because it was a big story. And so did thousands of other journalists, bloggers, forum participants, etc. So analyzing the whole thing kicked in instantly as well.
On my RSS reader, I saw multiple blog posts coming up from all over about the story. People analyzing and giving opinions, and everyone was reading everyone else’s stuff and trying to come up with the best conclusions. Partly because they wanted to know the real deal, and partly because they wanted to choose the right angle on the whole thing so they would not look like an ass to their readers and friends. So not only did bloggers want to ‘know’, they wanted to be the ones that looked like they ‘knew’. All of these bloggers, to include myself, were furiously going over the material as it came out over the internet. Our business is to know, and believe me, we were trying to do that.
That process of wanting to know, or what the professor up top worded as ‘collective detection mentality’ is the first part to understand here. We are human, we are competitive, and knowledge is power. When everyone is fighting to learn and know what is going on, that process creates the informational tsunami. That information wave can also do much to force an action and create a desired outcome for whomever originally intended to create such a thing. If you look at how President Obama and the upper command reacted to this incident, it is startling. This didn’t happen over the course of weeks or days. It happened virtually overnight and a top general has been removed from power.
The second concept to look at is the idea of human-flesh search engines. This is a concept out of China that has equally startling results. If a person is made a target by whomever on a forum, and whatever act this target did was sufficient to bring on interest and vengeance, well then you have all the elements of a human-flesh search. People want to ‘know’ why this target did what they did, they want to ‘know’ who they are, what they are doing, where they live, and most importantly, they want to make sure the target suffers for any wrong doing.
It is that power of wanting to ‘know’ that fuels the crowd in sort of virtual lynch mob. A prime example of this was the whole Jax Desmond affair here on the blog and forums. When it came out that Jax was lying about who he was, this industry reacted to it much like how the Chinese human-flesh search engines turned out. My readers were at first picking apart the guy’s lies, which was great, but then you could see on the forums that people wanted vengeance. Folks were posting his address, real name, etc. and doing all they could to get back at Jax. In their minds, he deserved everything he got, and each person out there was going to contribute to his demise. My point with this is that a crowd with the desire to ‘know’, coupled with the desire for vengeance against an individual they perceive as bad, can be quite impressive to watch and certainly damaging to the intended target. As a result, the Jax Desmond name is mud in this industry, and when the crowd decided they ‘knew’ enough to act, they quickly dispensed their justice.
Now let’s put them together, and build a snowmobile. Could you initiate a human-flesh search attack (HSA), that could create a desired result? I think you can, but only with a multi-faceted approach, and persistence. You must identify your target, identify the element that the crowd would like to ‘know’, and really exploit the virtual mob mentality if that target has done something that would be considered immoral. Your HSA strategy should strive to mimic other incidents that showed all the hallmarks what is mentioned in these two articles, and the examples I have provided. Most importantly, persistence is key, because you cannot say for sure if your HSA will work the first time out. It would take a constant attack from multiple angles, to be successful. It helps to throw the match in the right places though, and that is the key. The forest fire analogy fits well with conducting HSA. If you can keep shooting flares into pockets of unburned fuel, from across the canyon, eventually you will get one of the pockets burning and they will start the fire that you wanted to start.
The other thing about Human-flesh Search Warfare is defending against such a thing. Yet again, I look at the forest fire fighting analogy for the defense. You must create fire breaks to defend crucial aspects of your forest. Or in terms of what we are talking about here, you must protect yourself or your principle by insuring you have the appropriate defenses in place. Having journalists from Rolling Stone hanging out with you for a couple of weeks is probably not a good idea–no buffer there. Making wild and false claims online about your company or your personal actions, would also not be a good idea–not much buffer there either.
But most of all, you need good intelligence that focuses on you and the enemy. ‘Know yourself, know your enemy’ as Sun Tzu would say. Because if you know yourself, you will know what weaknesses, immoralities, etc. that the enemy might possibly use against you in this kind of attack. Knowing your enemy will help you to figure out their intentions towards you or folks like you, and how they like to conduct HSA. You should also stay up to date with technology and ‘knowing’ yourself. Use the same tools and resources that your enemy uses, if you want to really know what he knows. You can also try to copy your enemy’s strategy and tactics, and add one little technological or operational piece to that package to get an edge. If your information officer, or whomever is assigned to be your virtual body guard cannot do these basic things, then you should look at firing them. Because this is something any good practitioner of strategic communications or new media should be wary of and try to understand, so they know how to best build that fire break or place the match in the right patch of fuel in the forest.
Well, let me know what you think. If I am missing something here, or you have something to add to this stew of ideas, I would be interested to hear what you got.(be sure to read both stories below because they are relevant to this post) –Matt
New media too speedy to outflank
Edit: 6/25/2010- I wanted to add one more human-flesh search warfare case to this, for further thought. Wikileaks is an excellent example of the power of human-flesh search, and what it could do to the war effort. Some Army Intel kid leaked the videos anonymously to Wikileaks, and that was all that was necessary to spark the human-flesh search engine. Media was linking to the videos and site, and overnight, war leaders and politicians had to deal with this. When that came out, it exploded as well. But if you look at Wikileaks, what was the element about it, that would attract that Army Intel kid to contribute in the first place. That is why this is such an intriguing idea to talk about.
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New media too speedy to outflank
By John Timpane
Jun. 24, 2010
It began as a scattering of acid remarks within earshot of a Rolling Stone reporter. But – thanks in large part to Twitter, the Web, and cable news – barely two days after those remarks were disclosed, a media firestorm ended Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s tenure as commander of U.S. and NATO Coalition Forces in Afghanistan.
Fast, overwhelming, decisive: It’s a case study in how tightly connected 21st-century media can whip a story into a full-on tsunami, with startling consequences for individual careers and national policy.
“Rolling Stone broke the story, but it was Twitter that got the story rolling,” says Aram Sinnreich, a media professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. “The peer-produced social media are doing to cable-news networks what cable news did to broadcast. We’ve gone from the one-day news cycle to every hour on the hour to second by second.”
Noah Shachtman, a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution and a blogger at Wired magazine, says: “The fact so many of us are networked together enabled the information to spread speed-of-light fast. That turned what might have been a slower-burning flame into an instant conflagration.”
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Strategy: Rolling Stone’s ‘Runaway General’ Article And The Poker Game Called Afghanistan
So far, counterinsurgency has succeeded only in creating a never-ending demand for the primary product supplied by the military: perpetual war. There is a reason that President Obama studiously avoids using the word “victory” when he talks about Afghanistan. Winning, it would seem, is not really possible. Not even with Stanley McChrystal in charge.-The last sentences of this article, (and the narrative that Rolling Stone wants the reader to accept)
*****
This is an interesting article in many ways. To me, I look at it from several points of view that might provide an explanation for such a thing. I look at the article as a big commentary on the poker game called Afghanistan, with a table of politicians, a president and his administration, civilian leaders, the enemy, Karzai, the media, and General McChrystal. Each player has their own strategy in this game, and each player has a plan to win. The stakes are political survival, the direction of the war, and the narrative in the history books and everyone is fighting for public support and opinion. So what is each player’s strategy and goals in this game?
Well, let’s break it down. The first up is Rolling Stone. For them the pot in this poker game is a sensational story and a further narrative of the war as being lost. That COIN sucks and General McChrystal is a ‘Runaway General’, or uncontrollable. Any way they can show a division between all the crucial leadership running the war, is good for their goal of ending the war. Rolling Stone is also a supporter of the Obama administration, but they also do not support the war in Afghanistan. So to them, showing a failed war and putting all the blame on an out of control general helps to insulate their guy in office. To show support for the administration, while at the same time protesting the war by making it the product of that insane guy in charge called General McChrystal.
The next player to discuss is the President and all of his men. They need a win in Afghanistan, but they have also painted themselves into a corner with the July 2011 date for withdrawal. They did this to appease their political base, and this date and the coming election is going to effect all of their decision making on the wartime strategy there. There is also historical context, and Obama does not want this to be his Vietnam. No standing President wants that, and every President looks at a war under their watch as how it will look in the history books. So the coming election and history are the two factors pressing this administration. Not to mention that he also has the economy and the BP spill in the Gulf as two negatives. He needs a win in one or two of these areas, because coming into re-election with all of those ‘losers’ will definitely hurt him.
Then there is the civilian leadership like Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador. Of course there would be friction between him and McChrystal, and especially after McChrystal was his subordinate at one point, and especially after he was not chosen as the viceroy in Afghanistan. Plus DoD gets way more money than DoS when it comes to budget and resources, and you have that clash. But there is one part of this story that clued me into the history narrative of this war. When Eikenberry leaked the cable to the New York Times about how pathetic Karzai and the war strategy was, this was a way to seal their place in history books as a ‘I told you so’. McChrystal and gang referred to it as Eikenberry ‘covering his flank for the history books’. Anyone see the pattern here?
The politicians mentioned in the article all have the same goal as the President, and that is political survival. To understand the mind of a politician, all you have to do is think in terms of votes and re-election. Whatever it takes to stay in office and rally their base. So the anti-war politicians whose base is anti-war, only benefit if the war strategy fails. The pro-war politicians whose base is pro-war, only benefit if the war strategy works. That is the two sides of this political battle, and each side will latch on to anything that will give them an advantage with rallying their base. As it stands now, Obama has declared the war in Afghanistan as the ‘Just War’, so I imagine that the anti-war politicians really don’t see Obama as a tool to use for rallying their base. But if they can split Obama from his ‘just war’ view, and get him to not support the war effort or accept that it is lost, then they would benefit. That is their prize, and going back to the Rolling Stone prize, you can see who benefits from whom.
The pro-war politicians will rally around the general that will insure success. They need a winner to rally around. So if they supported McChrystal and now an article like this is circulating a perception that he is out of control, or worse yet, helps to create a divide between all parties involved, then they will not benefit. You need a team who has a unified command and a unity of effort, and this article gives the impression that this is not happening. There is also the issue of Article 88 which prohibits officers from using ‘contemptuous words’ about the president and his staff. Pro-war politicians at this point look at this story as a threat to their chosen winner, and ultimately a threat to winning the war. But the narrative of the story points to a divided team, and these pro-war politicians need to address this in order appease their base.
The pro-war politicians could do two things. They could rally around the general, and especially if the administration and others accept his apology (and not fire him), or they could call for his head and get someone new in there that will work better as a team. In other words, if the General is looked at as the guy who is stronger than the President after the dust settles, because he thumbed his nose at him and his staff and they have not fired him, then he might be a guy they could rally around. Especially coming into election, and especially if the President is not popular in the polls. But they also need a guy that can seal the deal, and they really need a guy that the troops on the ground support. Because most of the base of pro-war politicians, are military and military families who all care about winning this thing.
Karzai is at the table as well, and success to him is just hanging on to power and collecting as much money as he can from the war effort. He will support anyone that will continue his good deal, and McChrystal is the guy–kind of. Or at least that is the arrangement that the general has set up. The general is working with Karzai and doing what is necessary to control him and work with him. Kind of like a SF operator working with a village chief. He has to, because there is no alternative. Karzai also knows that if the Taliban come into power, he is out, so if he wants to survive politically and even physically, he needs a strong general and western partner to insure that survival.
The Taliban are also at this table, and their strategy is simple. Keep terrorizing the population/government and just survive long enough to make it to this withdrawal date of July 2011. This date is all they need to win, because all they have to do is pour it on while everyone leaves. And as long as the people perceive the west as weak and unable to defeat the Taliban, they will give in to the Taliban.
Finally there is General McChrystal. Personally, I think this article was a way to test the political resolve of those at the top. If they fired him, then McChrystal can fade away from the war and not be attached to it’s ‘perceived’ demise. The whole ‘history book effect’ comes into play here as well.
If they accept his apology and keep the guy where he is at, then that means they are saying ‘we did not like what you said, but we need a win in this war’. It is the same reasoning for contracting with Xe for security work–they might not like them, but they are the best, and for wars, you need the best of the best to win. So in essence, McChrystal was probing the defenses of these leaders at the ‘poker table’, to see what their position is on his command and the strategy.(calling their bluff or trying to determine their cards in the game) If you look at his history in war and life, you can see that this is exactly how he operates. He is testing them. Because an acceptance of the general’s apology, is also an acceptance of the fact that he ‘is the best man’ for the job. The general needs that acceptance in order to go after what he really needs for a victory in Afghanistan, and that is time.
I really think all of this boils down to one thing, and that is that stupid withdrawal date of July 2011. If COIN takes as long as most of the experts claim it takes, then attaching a time frame to the current strategy is stupid. The general knows this, and this was a huge debate with the Iraq war. During that time, it was debated furiously during the presidential debates and between the pro-war and anti-war crowds. With Iraq, the narrative was ‘get out now’ versus ‘leave based on success and results’. The latter is what we went with, and that is what worked.
A withdrawal should only be based on victory, a retreat is what happens when you lose. I personally think this article was McChrystal saying ‘if you want me in charge of this war effort, you must give me time and the flexibility to win’. Because as it stands now, to seal any kind of a victory in Afghanistan by July of next year is impossible. I think most observers would say so as well, and this article symbolizes the very battle between all parties who have a stake in this war and the pressing issue of time. Each player in this game looks at time as a leverage for their specific goals in this game. Each player is also looking at their place in the history books and their political survival.
There are plenty of angles to this war, and I am sure I am missing a few in this discussion. Below I posted a few pieces of the article that were interesting to me. Anyway, check out the entire article and let me know what you think. Things are changing pretty quickly and it will be interesting to see how this unfolds over the days and weeks. –Matt
Edit: 6/23/2010 – And he is replaced by General Petraeus. Wow, and all because of an article from Rolling Stone. He played his cards, he lost, and now there is a new player at the table.
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By Michael Hastings
July 2010
(Pieces of the article are posted below–all curse words edited)
Today, as McChrystal gears up for an offensive in southern Afghanistan, the prospects for any kind of success look bleak. In June, the death toll for U.S. troops passed 1,000, and the number of IEDs has doubled. Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the fifth-poorest country on earth has failed to win over the civilian population, whose attitude toward U.S. troops ranges from intensely wary to openly hostile. The biggest military operation of the year – a ferocious offensive that began in February to retake the southern town of Marja – continues to drag on, prompting McChrystal himself to refer to it as a “bleeding ulcer.” In June, Afghanistan officially outpaced Vietnam as the longest war in American history – and Obama has quietly begun to back away from the deadline he set for withdrawing U.S. troops in July of next year. The president finds himself stuck in something even more insane than a quagmire: a quagmire he knowingly walked into, even though it’s precisely the kind of gigantic, mind-numbing, multigenerational nation-building project he explicitly said he didn’t want.
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Books: Secret Commandos–Behind Enemy Lines With The Elite Warriors Of SOG
This is a great book, and is just one of many that Mr. Plaster has written over the years about SOG. What is cool is that I continue to get something new out of these books, every time I flip through them. Lots of battlefield innovation going on there and they should definitely be on your reading list.
The one area that I wanted to talk about with these books, was the North Vietnamese tracker teams that were tasked with hunting down these SOG teams. On page 54-55 of this book, Mr. Plaster goes into detail about what it was like to be hunted by these NVA tracking teams, and it was fascinating.
One of the deals I picked up on was the use of CS powder to throw off the dogs the Vietnamese would use. Although, according to the SOG troopers, it was skilled trackers who were more feared than dog teams. The reason for that is because a human can read the land and knows to keep their mouth shut.(the dogs were noisy, and only as good as the handlers) The NVA tracking teams would also drive teams purposely into traps.
The one story that Plaster talked about was being followed by a tracker team that wanted to be heard. Plaster’s SOG team figured out that the trackers were purposely trying to spook the recon team into paths, or channeling them into NVA blocking forces/ambushes. What made these trackers so effective, was how well they knew their little piece of land they were assigned along the Ho Chi Minh trail and their ability to read spoor. As a result, many SOG teams feared these trackers and had to plan accordingly. Many SOG teams were also killed and a few captured due to the efforts of these trackers. Having a knowledge of combat tracking in that environment, was just one key to the success of SOG troopers operating in such a hostile environment.
My other favorite part was Project Eldest Son. This was basically booby trapping ammunition, and planting that ammo on dead NVA soldiers that the teams would kill. This ammo was designed to destroy the AK when it was fired, as well as hurting or killing the soldier firing it. These types of operations would put doubt into the quality of ammunition the NVA troops were getting from the Chinese, and then hopefully hinder the relationship between China and Vietnam at the time. That was the idea at least.
One other story that I liked was about Bob Howard’s team and their use of Nightingales. These were distraction devices designed to make the enemy think they are being fired upon, when in fact they were just firecrackers going off. Pretty slick. But how the team used it, and the end result, was fantastic. The SOG team decided to slip one of these devices right into the center of a camp of NVA. When it went off, the NVA woke up and thought that an enemy attack was happening right in their camp. And because the SOG teams were known to dress up like the NVA and use their same weapons (pseudo operations), the NVA instantly thought that a SOG team was attacking. The funny thing was, is that there was no SOG team attacking and the chaos was being fueled by panicked NVA and the Nightingale. The outcome is what was really crazy. The NVA was actually shooting at each other and killing one another. It is the kind of results that would make the Joker from Batman giggle. In the end, the NVA camp was littered with dead and the SOG troopers were able to escape unharmed.
Anyways, check it out and let me know what you think. These books have been around for awhile, and they are great reads while out on deployment. On a side note, the video game called Call of Duty: Blackops has a story line based on the MACV SOG missions.(Mr. Plaster advised on that game) –Matt
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Secret Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines with the Elite Warriors of SOG
John L. Plaster
SOG was the Studies and Observations Group, a U.S. Army organization that operated behind enemy lines in the Vietnam War. It gathered intelligence and was responsible for rescuing downed pilots, identifying bombing targets, kidnapping enemy officers, wiretapping phone lines, ambushing convoys, and mining the Ho Chi Minh trail. Plaster shares details of his training in Fort Bragg as a Green Beret before being sent to Vietnam, where he served three one-year tours in SOG. He chronicles the group’s operations and portrays the soldiers he worked with there. Some readers may find too much here about fighting a war that many people today believe should have never happened, but the book nonetheless is an intriguing first-person account of this elite group’s intrepid operations.
Product Description
Monday, May 24, 2010
Bounties: How The Taliban And Al Qaeda Use Bounties In The War
“We can’t lie to our commanders: they can check to see if there was a fight in that area. We get money if we capture equipment too. A gun can fetch $1,000 [£690],” said a commander from Khost province who controls about 60 fighters.
The money usually reaches commanders via the traditional hawala transfer system found in many Muslim countries. They then share it among their men and sometimes celebrate with a feast.
“It’s a lot of money for us. We don’t care if we kill foreigners: their blood allows us to feed our families and the more we kill, the more we weaken them. Of course we are going to celebrate this,” said a commander from Ghazni province.
*****
This post is about what the enemy is doing to create an industry out of killing us. This is a disgusting topic to go over, but I still think it is important to study what the enemy is doing and learn from it. ‘Know your enemy’ is what I am all about, and this is what I am attempting to do here.
So let’s talk about this. I guess the big difference between our bounty system, and their bounty system, is that they actually want people to either kill or capture folks and that there are no legal restrictions for that process. It is the purest form of a free market based killing mechanism.
The west though are the only ones in this fight putting restrictions on how the bounty system is to be used, and in turn making the bounty system ineffective in my opinion. We have a 50 million dollar bounty on Usama Bin Laden’s head, but the only way to collect on it is that you can only give information on his whereabouts. A company or individual could not go after UBL and kill or capture him because the west abhors such things. It infringes on this so-called monopoly on the use of force that the we love to embrace, and meanwhile our enemies are mocking us.