[ninenot]

A very interesting analysis with even more interesting predictions.

[William McKinley]

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[Mitchell]

Thanks for posting this interesting article.

As I've been suggesting, a war with Iraq is merely preliminary to what will turn out to be a much more difficult war against the shadowy terrorist groups. Right now, Iraq is stronger militarily than those groups, but Iraq is vulnerable to U.S. military might. The terrorist groups are currently less of a threat, but they are much more difficult to fight, and they will be getting stronger.

I believe that it does make sense to tackle Iraq now, both because of the semi-traditional threat that it embodies (which is Pres. Bush's primary justification for the war) and because it will deprive the terrorists of some powerful state support, including a likely base of operations.

Nevertheless, this is one of the last stands of conventional warfare, rather than the true beginning of the war against Islamic terrorism.

[Asclepius]

I have an extensive amateur education in military history, and have also spent years thinking about the impact of strategic developments on investment.

Yuh-huh. Translation: I read and I think a lot.

I'm not a real doctor and I don't play one on TV.

I love all these self-described deep thinkers attempting to develop explanations for our President's commitment to liberating the Iraqi people that involve anything--anything at all, no matter how absurd--other than the stated, explicit, painfully obvious military, policy, and political goals.

[Forgiven_Sinner]

Interesting--yes. Correct analysis--no. I agree with him on most premises, but I think the case for Iraq/al Qaeda link is much better than he makes out. Iraq saps intelligence effort from terrorism? That's like saying in WW II, the invasion of Germany saps our intelligence resources from Japan--true, but irrelevant, since both were our enemies.

He somehow thinks al Qaeda can exist without a friendly state(s) to support it. I don't see how. Even Mao's Communist guerrillas assumed support from the countryside. Without it, they would fail. We've cut off Afghanistan from support. Soon Iraq will be cut off. We have intense pressure on Pakistan to curb their support of terrorism, and they have been doing this. Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Syria realize they're next after Iraq.

If attacking terrorism encourages recruiting, killing terrorists, destroying their infrastructure, how much would unbridled success of terrorism encourage recruiting? Hmmm?

[The Great Satan]

Plenty of interesting investment possibilities out there. I would go long on companies that make vaccines, treatments and test kits for potential biowar agents like anthrax. Another area that's going to receive a lot of attention going forward is low-cost, mass-producible sensors to detect aerosolized biological and chemical agents. That technology is on the cusp now, and the demand is going to be huge. Drone aircraft will be big. Satellite remote sensing will be big. Pattern recognition systems to pick stuff out of satellite imagery is another thing we're going to want a lot more of it. Add your own hot-list items at will.

[JasonC]

"They don't know how to fight non-state threats"

Horsefeathers. Their proven ability to do so is why they exist in the first place, and what makes them states. States know all about dominating their own territory. By border controls, inspection regimes, police forces, paramilitaries, jails - and by propaganda, systems of legitimation, rewards, ways of soliciting feedback for subjects, etc. The article writer might argue that the technical conditions that made their methods succeed in the past are changing, certainly. But saying states only know how to fight other states is simply ridiculous. States have fought non-state attackers, from individual criminals to heretical sects to fifth columns and spies, to organized domestic rebellions and civil wars, literally since the dawn of recorded history. There is precious little new about it.

Indeed, if anything it is the expectation that states won't have to do such things so much or so intensively, that is a recent assumption in a few rich democracies, which enjoy such unprecedented levels of public support and legitimacy that they have been able to shift their major concerns to other things. The wholely pacified and unified population that regards its government as entirely legitimate is the historical innovation, not the state that finds itself resisted by various non-state actors within or abroad.

The primary means states employ to deal with such threats are isolation and marginalization of non-state actors, both politically and physically. Followed by the principle of localized concentration and tactically long odds, applied in sequence. All coordinated by centralized information sifting and event tracking.

Political lines and policies are set to divide potential supporters from non-state enemies voluntarily. Areas where such enemies enjoy widespread support are physically seperated from other areas, to isolate problems and reduce their ability to coerce opinion in their favor over wide areas. Then forces - military, counter-insurgency, or mere police - converge on such areas, on reported sightings and events elicited from agents or willing subjects. They use the fact that the state is overall much richer and has far more supporters, to get long odds against a given cell at any point of actual conflict. Without their security forces being larger in the aggregate than their non-state enemies (typically ranging from 1/250 to 1/10 the size of the subject population, in fact), they can accomplish this in sequence by "re-using" security forces that easily survive such lopsided local encounters. Which are often so lopsided they can, in addition, "pull their punches" for the sake of political support (e.g. using batons instead of rifles, or rifles instead of tanks, etc, up the chain of escalation). These engagements also function as deterrents, demonstrations, and "street theater", dissuading future opponents.

States also need information systems against non-state actors. The better these information systems are, the more discriminating the state's aim can be, targeting only committed enemies instead of broad classes of their potential supporters. As was the usual case in the long term past, precisely due to the limited intelligence capabilities of the small state organizations of the past. So they targeted as rebels entire subcultures or regions. With better intel, political methods can do more of the work (e.g. all the residents of Kabul that celebrated an anti-Taliban victory, who did not need to be fought house to house or blasted into submission.)

Marginal organizations stick to shadows for good reasons. States are not regularly replaced by a hundred small organizations inside them every other day for good reasons. States mostly win such conflicts, most of which are so lopsided they hardly ever rise to the level of public concern.

The cases that do, are ones where there is significant political appeal for the enemy side in the conflict, allowing continual recruitment to replace losses, high levels of dedication in the face of nearly suicidal objective and personal chances against a state machine, etc. Such positions need to be non-appeasable, or states defuse them easily with political methods, justice, rewards and punishments, etc. The number of non-appeasable, stable or long term, fanatical and violent objections to existing states, is not exactly large. Precisely because states adapt to the pressures on them to minimize such dangers to their continued control and importance.

But states can and do artificially create such objections to undermine the power of hostile powers. And such "stoked" causes can and do outlive their state backing. The present climate of anti-US opinion in parts of the 3rd world has some present causes, certainly. But a large portion of it is a "propaganda hangover" from three generations of global rivalry with great powers, wielding hostile ideologies. We are, in short, still cleaning up the political mess left by the 20th century.