NetWars

Communications networks and irregular war

You think irregular fighters don't realize the force multiplier effect of a secure communications network? An interesting article in todays Wall Street Journal details Hezbollah's victory in Lebanon. I found the bit about Hezbollah's comms network, and the lengths they went to wire the country with fiber optic, fascinating. After the fighting in 2006, it was obvious command and control was one of Hezbollah's strong points. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah apparently calls the network the group's "No. 1 weapon."

The catalyst for Lebanon's recent spasm was the government's discovery several months ago that Hezbollah was secretly expanding a network that could provide secure communications in times of battle. The network, the fight it sparked and Wednesday's resolution provide a dramatic illustration of Hezbollah's surging power in Lebanon.

Prime Minister Siniora ordered the network dismantled in early May. He also ordered the dismissal of an airport official his government labeled an ally of Hezbollah. After Hezbollah's violent response -- it seized neighborhoods, then handed them over to the neutral army -- the government was forced to rescind both orders last week.

 The drama began developing late last year when engineers working for Lebanon's telecommunications minister got an odd tip: Someone was mysteriously burying spools of fiber-optic cable near a village in southern Lebanon.

Then came a call from the mayor of Choueifat, an eastern suburb of the capital. "There are strange works, unknown to the municipality...on public and private lands," he said, according to Telecommunications Minister Marwan Hamadeh, who spoke in an interview before the government backed down on May 14.

He sent engineers to investigate, and soon determined that Hezbollah had a network stretching for more than 200 miles -- in a nation only about 140 miles long. It had wireless transmitters, Mr. Hamadeh said, and redundancies so communications could continue even if part of it was damaged. The government reported the network to the United Nations, saying it consisted of "wired and wireless links to the telephone network of our neighbor, the Syrian Arab Republic" -- which dominated Lebanon for years before agreeing to a pullout in 2005.

The government long knew Hezbollah had a network of some sort, but thought it was limited and of little threat to central authority. But after the 2006 war, the government told the U.N., Hezbollah secretly expanded it under the guise of postwar reconstruction, burying cables beneath newly paved roads.

 The work, the government added, was done with the "participation in the field" of the Iranian Headquarters for the Reconstruction of Lebanon, an Iranian agency that has claimed credit for hundreds of rebuilding projects since the 2006 war. It wasn't reachable for comment.

The telecom minister said some of the equipment was imported from "the West," declining to be specific. Lebanese officials also believe Iran supplied some.

For government officials critical of Hezbollah, the system was a clear sign of Hezbollah's worrisome ambitions. "This," declared Mr. Hamadeh, pointing to a hand-drawn map of the network, "is the takeover of Lebanon."

Oh this is rich. The White House claims there's never been a civil war in Iraq

Apparently the White House is pissed off that NBC News "deceptively edited" an interview with Bush talking about the whole appeasement nonsense. So Republican political operative and White House consigliere Ed Gillespie, fires off a letter to NBC News prez Steve Capus demanding that NBC run the whole interview, absent the edits. Whatever. So run the interview.

But this part of Gillespie's letter is unreal. He's pissed off that NBC said Iraq was in a state of civil war, way back in 2006:

On November 27, 2006, NBC News made a decision to no longer just cover the news in Iraq, but to make an analytical and editorial judgment that Iraq was in a civil war. As you know, both the United States government and the Government of Iraq disputed your account at that time. As Matt Lauer said that morning on The Today Show: "We should mention, we didn't just wake up on a Monday morning and say, 'Let's call this a civil war.' This took careful deliberation.'"

I noticed that around September of 2007, your network quietly stopped referring to conditions in Iraq as a "civil war." Is it still NBC News's carefully deliberated opinion that Iraq is in the midst of a civil war? If not, will the network publicly declare that the civil war has ended, or that it was wrong to declare it in the first place?

Okay, first of all, this is coming from the folks who denied there was an insurgency in Iraq from 2003 to some time around 2004, between the Fallujah battles. But to claim that Iraq was not in a civil war during 2006, are you kidding!? And to demand a retraction? According to the Pentagon's own numbers, some 3,000 Iraqi civilians were being killed every month during the height of the fighting in 2006! Not a civil war, what the hell was that?

Here's how General Petraeus described the situation in Iraq in his April 8 testimony (courtesy of Real Clear Politics) before Congress: "[C]ivilian deaths have decreased over the past year to a level not seen since the February 2006 Samarra mosque bombing that set off the cycle of sectarian violence that tore the very fabric of Iraqi society in 2006 and early 2007."

Of course who would ever call a "cycle of sectarian violence that tore" Iraqi society a civil war?  Obviously Petraeus himself wasn't allowed to say civil war, because earlier in his testimony he said Iraq had stood on the "brink" of civil war during 2006-2007. Instead he uses a White House approved euphemism for describing the sectarian fighting in Iraq.

In September, I described the fundamental nature of the conflict in Iraq as a competition among ethnic and sectarian communities for power and resources. This competition continues, influenced heavily by outside actors. And its resolution remains the key to producing long- term stability in Iraq. Various elements push Iraq's ethno-sectarian competition toward violence. Terrorists, insurgents, militia extremists and criminal gangs pose significant threats.

That's right, it's an "ethnic sectarian competition." No civil war here people, move along.

Apocalyptic jihadis? Are you sure?

The parameters of the Republican presidential election strategy have now been clearly defined, it will be all about who is tough enough to deal with the threat posed by Iran, tough talking McCain or negotiating Obama. Republican strategist Karl Rove made every election since 9-11 revolve around fear of attack from the "other" and adequate displays of patriotism. The Republicans intend to make the 2008 elections about a nuclear armed Iran, which, since Iran does not have nuclear weapons, means there will be endless debate about hypotheticals.

In a speech in Chicago today, McCain blasted Obama for saying he'd meet with the Iranian leader:

An ill conceived meeting between the President of the United States and the President of Iran, and the massive world media coverage it would attract, would increase the prestige of an implacable foe of the United States, and reinforce his confidence that Iran’s dedication to acquiring nuclear weapons, supporting terrorists and destroying the State of Israel had succeeded in winning concessions from the most powerful nation on earth. 

This will be the subject of endless pundit chatter from now until November, whether securing a meeting with a U.S. President amounts to winning concessions. I'm not so sure. I think summit meetings are summit meetings, not concessions.

As for the subject of hypotheticals, this comment by Andy McCarthy at NRO's Corner, doesn't seem quite right. He says:

Ahmadinejad and his cohort are apocalyptic jihadi revolutionaries.  Shouldn't what they believe be analyzed and factored in as we try to assess the threat that they pose?  Or would that offend moderates too much?  It seems awfully silly to compare them to the Soviet Union when, with the latter, we had a deterrence policy — Mutually Assured Destruction — that was explicitly based not only on the size of the enemy arsenal but on whether, given his motivations, he was likely to act.  Obama appears content to calculate based on the size of the arsenal, period.  That's not MAD, but it's madness.

Are the Iranian ruling elite truly "apocalyptic jihadi revolutionaries"? Should our policy towards Iran, and a decision on whether to carry out an unprovoked bombing campaign against Iran, be based on what we think are the beliefs of a very small number of people who may or may not pull all the strings in a country that we clearly do not understand all that well? Shouldn't decisions on whether to start a full-blown war be based on something more concrete, such as actions that reveal an enemy's dedication to apocalytpic jihadi beliefs, and the enemy's ability to carry out anything apocalyptic, rather than our interpretations of an enemy's belief system?

Somebody has to pick up the Sons of Iraq tab

In a bloggers roundtable last week, U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Mark Hertling, commander of Multinational Division North and 1st Armored Division, spelled out the importance of paying off the former Sunni insurgents to not plant roadside bombs. I've written fairly extensively about the propsering IED market in Iraq, where real financial reward exists for attacking American troops. When I asked Hertling who was conducting most of the IED attacks, he said there are at least 14 different insurgent groups they were tracking in his area, including everybody's favorite bogeyman, Al Qaeda in Iraq, and the more nationalist insurgent groups such as the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) and Ansar al Sunna.

Hertling said he was in a meeting with Iraqi PM Maliki and his lead intel guy. Hertling said the Iraqi intel guy gave his estimate for how many insurgents he thought were active in Mosul. Hertling wouldn't tell us the number. He said he told Maliki:

[Y]ou have to halve that, because about 50 percent of the people conducting attacks are not conducting attacks because they believe in the ideology. They're conducting the attacks because they're being paid by these groups. And the unemployment is so off the charts over here that this is the only way some of these guys can feed their children... So one of the points we continue to make with the prime minister is, we've got to continue to get jobs for these people. And as the jobs come - and that's one of the things that the Sons of Iraq did for us. It kind of gave not only a bridging to the security apparatus, but it also allowed people to start getting paid for doing something other than planting bombs, which in our view, is a good thing.

This is going to become a big issue soon. Who is going to keep the money flowing into the hands of the SOI so they stay on the sidelines? The U.S. military has replaced the extensive patronage network that Saddam Hussein had in place to placate the tribes and buy their support. Question is, will the Maliki, or any other Shiite dominated government, continue that practice?

Video of the day: When you're in a hole stop digging

Winston Churchill said, "A good knowledge of history is a quiver full of arrows in debate." I think its safe to say that right wing talk show host Kevin James' quiver is rather empty. Chris Mathews delivers perhaps the greatest public bitch slap I've ever witnessed: 

"NATO is in Afghanistan, it’s time they did some soldiering.”

That, and some other choice comments were made to the NYT's Jane Perlez by Owari Ghani, governor of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province, and President Musharraf's representative to the tribal areas where central government control, or even influence, does not exist. "Lawless," as the tribal areas are often described, is not entirely accurate. They're lawless in terms of central government control, the people who live there operate under their own tribal laws and customs.

The very well reported NYT story says Pakistan has little interest in stopping cross border raids by the Taliban into neighboring Afghanistan, despite entreaties by U.S. and NATO officials. A personal plea from Admiral Eric Olson, commander U.S. Special Operations Command, to allow special ops troops to pursue Taliban insurgents into the tribal areas apparently went no where, the Times reports. The Pakistanis are more interested in restoring some degree of stability to the area after a rash of suicide attacks in their own country.

The Times reports that the Musharraf government is about to sign off on a peace treaty with insurgents in the country and will basically halt its own middling efforts to prevent Taliban attacks across the border into Afghanistan. Good job Pakistan. Gotta love the ISI. This Ghani guy is a real peach too. The Times story says:

Mr. Ghani, a key architect of the pending peace accord, believes along with many other Pakistani leaders that the United States is floundering in the war in Afghanistan. Pakistan, he said, should not be saddled with America’s mistakes, especially if a solution involved breaching Pakistan’s sovereignty, a delicate matter in a nation where sentiment against the Bush administration runs high.

The Times gets at the key problem sinking our counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan, that is, the insurgents have convenient safe havens and ample support among the local Pashtun population.

Pakistan’s government has long been wary of nationalist and separatist strains among the Pashtuns, whose population straddles the Pakistani-Afghan border. "I said it would be extremely dangerous,” Khalid Aziz, a former chief secretary of North-West Frontier Province, said he told Admiral Olson. “It would increase the number of militants, it would be a war of liberation for the Pashtuns. They would say: ‘We are being slaughtered. Our enemy is the United States.’ ”

Airpower's limited utility

Using airpower to effect outcomes on the ground requires really, really good intelligence. Not just in irregular warfare, but humanitarian operations as well. A great column by Oxfam UK director Barbara Stocking on proposals to air drop aid to Burma's cyclone ravaged population highlights some of the real limitations of airpower:

Dropping pallets of aid from the sky seems a straightforward, elegant and technological solution to the difficult political problem of the Burmese government's refusal to allow enough humanitarian workers into the country to deal with the disaster. Except air drops are not the aid equivalent of smart bombs. Running a humanitarian effort from the skies, like running a purely airborne war, is fraught with problems.

For a start it requires excellent intelligence. Yet no one knows exactly where the worst affected areas are, or how many people are suffering in each place. We don't know if people are on the move, or what diseases are starting to appear, or exactly what state their homes and infrastructure are in.

Without good intelligence it's very hard to run an effective humanitarian operation - especially an airborne one. It would be only too easy to drop the food miles from the nearest village, or even in water or swamp. Food is perishable and leaving it outside for too long could ruin it. You can't drop a well or a sanitation system from the sky without specialists to set it up. Communities could find themselves with aid completely inappropriate to their situation.

Stocking clearly knows her logistics:

Then there is the astronomical cost. Just keeping an aircraft on the runway, ready to go, costs at least $25,000 a day. The most commonly used plane, the Il 76, can carry 20 tonnes of food - enough to feed 40,000 people the most minimal rations for a day. That could mean nearly 40 air drops a day to feed the 1.5m people most seriously affected - a massive expenditure for such a scattergun, uncoordinated approach.

This is counterinsurgency?

When did American troops begin using air strikes to take out suspected sniper positions in the middle of Baghdad neighborhoods? The Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual tells troops to be very judicious in their use of firepower so as not to harm innocents and lose the population's support. Reading this Michael Gordon account in the NYT of U.S. soldiers battling in Sadr City, I wonder did the commander on the ground make any effort to ensure the building was empty of civilians? Are we really winning over the population by walling off neighborhoods and then bombing buildings in what we deem the bad zone?

The floor was covered with broken concrete, empty cigarette packages and a dusty brown teddy bear, a fleeting reminder that the fighting position had once been someone’s home. A splotch of red blood was in a corner room where the Iraqi soldier had been hit. His fellow soldiers said that he had been sitting in a plastic chair and looking over the wall when a round hit the side of his face, ripping across his eyes.

Peering over the bottom edge of window frame, Captain Cleland determined that the shot had probably come from a hole for an air-conditioning unit in the top floor of a three-story structure on the northwest side of the barrier.

The captain used the range finder to determine the precise coordinates, 150 yards to the north. Before he became an adviser to the Iraqi forces, Captain Cleland was a field artilleryman.

“So we are good at this,” he explained matter-of-factly.

Sergeant Alicea radioed the coordinates and described the target to a team of Apache attack helicopters. It seemed possible that the sniper had moved with the arrival of the Americans, but another rifle shot rang out.

Sergeant Alicea said it was important to strike nonetheless. Often, a sniper will leave his weapon so he can blend in with civilians on the street, he said. If nothing else, he said, the Apaches would eliminate another hiding place.

“We keep cutting down positions they can use,” he said.

After a long wait, a Hellfire missile soared over the soldiers’ position and slammed into the building, demolishing a wall on the top floor and setting it aflame.

Gates slams FCS

Wow, I can't believe he actually went after the Army's prize program... but he did. In a speech today at a Heritage Foundation conference in Colorado Springs, Co., Defense Secretary Robert Gates questioned the utility of the Army's massive $200 billion Future Combat Systems modernization program. Gates' comments are the strongest words denouncing the problem plagued program I've seen yet from a high ranking defense official. In his speech, Gates again repeated, as he has in almost every public speech he's given since taking over the Pentagon, that the irregular wars we're fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are the kinds of wars we'll fight in the future.

[I]t is hard to conceive of any country confronting the United States directly in conventional terms – ship to ship, fighter to fighter, tank to tank – for some time to come. The record of the past quarter century is clear: the Soviets in Afghanistan, the Israelis in Lebanon, the United States in Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Smaller, irregular forces – insurgents, guerrillas, terrorists – will find ways, as they always have, to frustrate and neutralize the advantages of larger, regular militaries. And even nation-states will try to exploit our perceived vulnerabilities in an asymmetric way, rather than play to our inherent strengths.

Gates said irregular wars demand the right people, not costly weapons programs. Then, he talked briefly about the procurement challenges facing DOD. He only mentioned one program.

I believe that any major weapons program, in order to remain viable, will have to show some utility and relevance to the kind of irregular campaigns that, as I mentioned, are most likely to engage America’s military in the coming decades. In Texas, I had an opportunity to see a demonstration of the parts of the Army’s Future Combat Systems that have moved from the drawing board to reality. A program like FCS – whose total cost could exceed $200 billion if completely built out – must continue to demonstrate its value for the types of irregular challenges we will face, as well as for full-spectrum warfare.

In government speak, and particularly in public comments by a defense secretary, that amounts to a HUGE vote of no-confidence in a weapons program that has gotten so out of control the Army can't even explain what it's supposed to do. Right after saying he went to Ft. Bliss, Texas to see the FCS dog and pony show, instead of saying how impressed he was with what he saw, he brings up the program's cost, and then says it has to prove its the right program for irregular wars and then says "if completely built out." Of course he's not buying into the Army/Boeing bullshit, nobody with a brain and not a direct financial connection to the program do. I really wish Gates would stick around into the next administration.

I interviewed Gen' Peter Schoomaker a couple of times back when he was chief and when the subject turned to FCS, the former special operator never talked very enthusastically about the program. He'd spout the usual Army talking points, but not will any real conviction. Schoomaker, for all his failings as a chief, of which they're were a few, realized infantry win irregular wars, not some assesnine belief that technology will provide you with perfect information on the battlefield. I don't think he ever bought the snake oil Boeing was selling.

Sons of Lebanon?

Via AbuMaq, a fascinating piece from Lebanon by the LA Times' Borzou Daraghi on "a curious experiment in private-sector warfare," where a U.S. backed Sunni faction, the Futures movement, tried to build a militia, under the guise of private security firms that handled payment,training and equipping. It appears they missed the whole "unit cohesion" part of the effort, proving once again that you can't just cobble together an effective fighting force, no matter how much money you throw at it.

For months, Lebanese security officials in the army and the Internal Security Forces warily watched the growth of the Future-Secure Plus fighting force. Officials close to and inside Hezbollah said they were monitoring the growth of the potential threat.

Over the last year, Secure Plus went from a small security company to an organization with 3,000 employees and unofficial associates on the payroll, mostly poor Sunnis from the country's north. Some were armed with pistols and assault rifles.

"We have . . . thousands of young people in plainclothes working with us all over the country," a company official said before the clashes started.

Even those who feared the development hoped the Future movement's growing military capacity would create a "balance of terror" with the more heavily armed Shiite fighters, government officials and members of the group say.

How did the Sunni private security/militia force going by the name Secure Plus do in their first real trial by fire? Not so good:

When the clashes began last week, the Sunni fighters proved no match for Hezbollah's firepower, discipline and intelligence capabilities.

Secure Plus and Future movement offices and strongholds were pummeled. Hezbollah first targeted Future movement positions in mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhoods, easily defeating them.

Meanwhile, the Shiite militiamen encircled but did not enter Sunni strongholds, terrorizing fighters into giving up without causing huge casualties on either side.

Hezbollah also shut down the Future movement's media outlets, cutting off its ability to rally public support.

The Sunni fighters may have been lulled into a false belief that Hezbollah would not enter into full-fledged confrontation. The security company executive said the Future fighters were caught off guard by the speed of the offensive.

"Maybe they thought they could hold Hezbollah off for a few days or a few weeks before help arrived," he said. "They faced an onslaught that they had never planned for."