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Our Diversity Is Our Strength
Connecting a few dots here…
- Terrorism and strategy expert John Robb wrote 10 years ago that the nature of warfare is changing. There are no “front lines” anymore, rather, the enemy is among us, and groups as small as two people can bring an entire city to a grinding halt.
- Demonstrators and rioters have been using peer-to-peer communication such as instant messaging as a means to self-organize for over five years, while the police and other first responders rely on conventional “spoke and hub” communications systems where a dispatcher routes the appropriate response to a disturbance from a central location.
- The “sharing economy” is moving trust away from government-approved organizations and onto our collective shoulders. I trust my Uber driver because I know if he wasn’t trustworthy, he wouldn’t be driving for Uber. The sharing economy also means that people can turn their consumer goods into something that provides more economic security for themselves and their families.
- Firearms ownership is up, way up, in the United States, and personal protection is one of the main reasons behind this increase in gun ownership in our country.
Violent Islamic terrorists and often-violent Black Lives Matter hangers-on are self-organizing through peer-to-peer networks, and as a result, they can strike quicker and faster than governments can manage. Terrorists are agile, while the blue-state model of government is not. Terrorist live in a post-industrial world while our first responders still hobble around in the outmoded, industrial-age shackles of centralized, top-down planning and strategy.
But it doesn’t need to be that way. Thanks to the empowerment of the Internet and the smartphone, we are becoming less and less reliant on central government for how we live our lives. Why, therefore, can’t we use peer-to-peer networking and decentralized response to our advantage? Just as Uber and AirBnB turn our consumer goods into something that helps others, we can turn the smartphone and the concealable defensive pistol into something that protects ourselves and others. We have smartphone apps that can show us the stupid places where stupid people are doing the stupid things that might get us in trouble, and we have apps that will summon help from our friends if we chose to ignore the warning signs and go there anyways or if bad things happen to us despite all our planning. We can carry a portable, concealable means of defending ourselves and our loved ones from lethal force and also carry a portable, concealable means of keeping people alive if the worst happens and lethal force is used against us.
Nature has shown us that the best way to defeat a non-localized attack is with a non-localized response. Our bodies react to the threats of infection and disease with a scattered and yet networked response of white blood cells and other defense mechanisms. The time is long overdue for society to empower a dispersed response to the dispersed threat of modern-day terrorism.
Power to the people. All the people.
Published in General
The only reason there aren’t any “front lines” is because we choose not to fight our enemy. At least not with any seriousness. If we were serious about defeating our enemies, there would be very clear lines of where we have conquered and where we haven’t. There has been no earth shattering change in basic military concepts.
I agree with all of this, and feel bad that the second comment is not a thoughtful response to your excellent post, but I cannot let the claim that Boston is a real city go past without rebuttal.
Seriously, though, this is a really excellent post and I wish that I had more of substance that I could add to it. Thanks to your being a contributor, I can’t even meaningfully recommend it for promotion. Still, know that if liking posts or other mechanisms for showing approval than clumsily written comments were available, I’d be availing myself of them.
If we were serious about fighting our enemy, would Omar Mateen not have shot a bunch of people? ISIS in the Middle East is being gradually wrapped up, but while that sort of thing can reduce terrorism, mass shootings, and such, it can’t stop them. People like Dylan Roof, Tim McVeigh, and their Islamic equivalents can’t really be engaged with through foreign policy. We can stop it from being as rational to believe that American policy can be influenced in favor of the terrorists, we can make it clear that terrorist movements will not succeed (as we are currently doing with ISIS), and we can make it, eg., somewhat harder to buy fertilizer in industrial quantities. That done, though, our first and last line of defense is the response of the Americans on the spot.
For some time, I have been suggesting that the notion of an armed militia of all willing citizens is an idea whose time has come around again. I can easily imagine a scenario where a score or more of snipers (like the “Beltway snipers” of 2002) are loosed on the entire nation, engaging in frequent, random attacks. There are clearly not enough police (or even military) to stop them. Only substantial numbers of armed citizens in every community could possibly stop them. The blue state solution would be to “shelter in place” (i.e. shut down the entire country), indefinitely.
Use of mobile communication apps are an addition I had not thought about (I am old, nontechnical). It is a very good idea and a force multiplier.
Excellent post and very insightful.
The networking mindset is the real revolution of the 21st century, the next step beyond the central organization of the 20th century.
A network mindset is self reliant with a community. Originally we had to be self reliant on a farm or homestead. Then we had to be cogs in the machine of bureaucracy.
Now we need aspects of both without the reliance on central control but a predefined architecture.
Uber places an architecture on the network, not a control center.
So for self defense, with the right legal architecture, we should be able to swarm any threat.
Good piece, Kevin, you continue to be among the best here..
Good stuff, Kevin. Will there be a follow up post on how the decentralized network of first responders will be organized and vetted? Or on how the legal issues will be dealt with, in a fashion similar to Good Samaritan laws, maybe? Of course, the Left’s response will be that our answer to their preferred lawlessness is little other than vigilante action, surely racist and ineffective.
I have to disagree. The reason that there are no frontlines is that we are not fighting a nation or nations, we are fighting against ideas, be they radical Islam or Black Nationalism. Attacking Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan or any other Islamic nation is not going to end the conflict. If fact, it might very well increase the virulence of the disease causing it to metastasize. As to the BLM terrorists, all that can be done with them is to jail or kill them one at a time. If enough of them die the idea may lose its appeal. They aren’t believers in martyrdom or 21 virgins.
The police are doing what they can in the case of the BLMs, this despite the attempts to justify their behavior by the left. It is unlikely that the flow of Muslims into this country is going to slow or cease no matter who gets to be president. A certain small percentage of them will likely be a problem. Our individual safety is, first and foremost, our own personal responsibility. Be alert, Be aware, Be focused, and be prepared to protect yourself.
To a certain extent, yes. Opening our borders and letting in “refugees” consisting of military-age men from war zones is the very definition of insanity.
But.
Even if we locked up our borders as tight as a drum, violent actors would still get through because we love liberty so much. I’d prefer to fight them over there, but if we must fight them here, I prefer to win.
There’s a post fermenting in the sour mash of my brain that expands on what David Yamane is saying here, that because NRA training is the de facto standard for concealed carry training, the NRA is the gatekeeper for entry into the “safe” ranks of armed society.
Individualism has always been the strength of this nation. Far to many people are forgetting that now a days. Our “diversity” is not based on race, sex, income, class, or occupation. It’s based on the belief of the dignity, and God given rights of every living person.
When you look back at the failures of this country, it always amounts to us not living up to the ideals that this nation was founded on.
That in a nutshell is our immortal declaration.
False reasoning. It can be made so difficult that the few that get through are easily managed. You are shifting the goal posts, as did @jamesofengland by bringing in McVeigh. Yes, there will always be “domestics.” So what? Doesn’t change @Skyler‘s point.
Your point—fight a network with a better network, not top-down, 19th century doctrine—is what GEN McChrystal got pretty good at it, among other innovative leaders in AFG and IRQ.
And that operational art could work against BLM . . . or MS13 . . . or other Chicago gangs . . . but you first have to declare war and mean it.
It’s just plain malarkey that our love of liberty requires us to fight as ineffectually as we have under Obama. That failure was first and foremost a strategic one, brought upon by the sadly clownish incompetence of the President. Strategic failure manifest as blinkered operational art, and finally static, useless tactics. None of that was somehow foreordained by advancing comms technology. Failure was mandated by ignorant, arrogant leadership. Period.
Right, because the Nazis and the Japanese weren’t possessed of any ideas? The Wehrmacht was comprised of nation-state borgs with no ideological passion for Nordic racialism? The Imperial Japanese Army wasn’t wedded to Emperor worship? That’s not an idea? The nation state of North Vietnam had no ideas it wanted to impose on the South?
Sorry, @Skyler‘s right . . . “There has been no earth shattering change in basic military concepts.” What has failed is our leadership, which BTW loves to hide behind ridiculous, self-serving notions like that suddenly fighting “ideas” has changed the nature of warfare. I seem to recall this nation fighting for an idea once—we called it liberty, and those that preferred monarchy weren’t terrible pleased about their idea being cast off.
To be fair, Bush’s strategy was only slightly better.
Nobody mentioned domestic terrorism except you, nor that Obama is fighting the war on (some) terror effectively. Violent actors from outside a nation state can slip in and commit horrid acts almost anywhere: The Secret Service itself has said that it’s almost impossible to defend The Chief against someone willing to trade his or her life for the President’s, and it’s like that as well with just about any security measure you can think of.
The brutal fact of the matter is that police states tend to have less terrorism because they clamp down on things so hard, they catch the terrorists in the same net they throw over their citizens.
Not a fan of that, and not the road we should be going down. I don’t believe in Franklin’s old saw about scacrificing liberty for security (There are reasons why he was never let near the halls of power and was instead shipped off to France), but I do believe in erring on the side of freedom and individuality. I agree that we’re in this fight because of Obama declaring he has won the war in Iraq (hint to the Prez: You don’t decide that, your opponent does), but that doesn’t change the reality of today. The fight is here, it’s on our soil, I’m not going to Mosul any time soon, so how am I going to win the war here?
Interesting, but I don’t know. Don’t we try to kill tumors before they metastasize, not one cell at a time. Isn’t our immune system centrally controlled through eons of evolved defenses. Individuals operating in a free economy, work most things out–ideas, interests, relationships, desires, but we don’t combat crime or fight wars as individuals, we join together and make public goods. We can’t even get the folks to not use illegal substances which feed organized crime. So what is the role of free, risk averse individuals in this new kind of war? Good question, Ok be alert, perhaps armed and trained, but we need effective top down public security. Indeed that is, broadly defined, the only legitimate role of government.
You missed the point completely. The Nazis and Japanese were nations with homelands that they were defending, and which we could attack and defeat. Who do you plan to attack in this situation? Whose cities will you bomb? Whose army and navy will you fight? You obiously do not understand asymetical warfare, something very different than WWII.
We are on the receiving end of Stalin’s quote regarding the Pope and his army. Arms cannot win a battle of cultures.
“Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers
Ask the Carthaginians if arms can win a battle of cultures. Ask the formerly christian nations of Syria, Turkey, Egypt, Lebanon, whether arms can win a battle of cultures. Last I heard they don’t have a christian culture anymore.
To be fair, I kinda mentioned domestic terrorism. I felt like it supported your point that we should be armed and ready to deal with the threats that we face. It’s true that if we were to declare war on BLM that would change things a lot, but I don’t know what a serious declaration of war against an American political movement would look like. If it looks like the Palmer Raids, I suspect that we’d continue to need our guns for a while; probably more so in the short-medium term.
The key indicator of whether someone was an enemy in WWII was nationality and (perhaps) uniform rather than ideology. If you were a social democratic leaning German or a conservative German, if you were a moderate Nazi or a moderate Communist (in other words, someone who voted for the party but wasn’t likely to be a party functionary or subscribed to party magazines), you were roughly equivalently likely to be one of the guys shooting at Americans in Normandy.
The key indicator of whether someone is an enemy in Iraq has not been nationality. After Saddam’s fall great bulk of Iraqi combatants fought on our side, but there were also many Iraqis who fought for various other groups. The government of Tunisia is one of the Middle East’s better governments, but there’s a bunch of Tunisians in ISIS; the difference between people trying to build a civilized society in Tunisia is not nationality or even a broad category of religion (it’s not even that the bad guys are the guys with conservative interpretations of the Koran; most of those with strong traditionalist interpretations are on our side of the armed struggle even if they’re on the wrong side of some other stuff). It’s a specific set of political/ religious ideas. That’s a genuine difference from WWII.
In WWII the numbers of armed enemies we were facing were enormous, but the number of people trying to murder Americans in America was very small. This time the number of armed enemies we face is relatively small, but the number of people trying to murder Americans in America, while still pretty small, is considerably larger. This is true for ISIS and AQ, and even more true for BLM, who have no foreign soldiers to speak of (I don’t know if they have any, but maybe the Lord’s Resistence Army or someone has declared loyalty). For these and other reasons, it’s helpful to formulate strategy differently for dealing with the threats we face today than to the strategies that worked out well for us in the 1940s.
Hasn’t that been the problem? We allow people to get off the hook for the deeds of their government (like in Iraq), and we allow governments off the hook for the deeds of organizations operating within their borders (like in Afghanistan).
The truth is that it is the people themselves that are the problem. We need to abandon the Westphalian model and hold the people responsible for what is done in their name by the government they choose to allow to rule them.
If we don’t make them afraid for what will happen if they don’t get control of their own government, why would they risk their safety to oust a dictator like Saddam, or an organization like Al Qaeda operating within their borders?
On a micro level I saw this daily in Iraq. The people knew we wouldn’t (usually or by policy) hurt them, but Al Qaeda most certainly would. Who do you think they chose to support? Often Al Qaeda because they were certain to die if they didn’t, but they’d get more handouts if they didn’t support us.
I liked many Iraqis. They are fundamentally a good people with a desire to be modern and educated. But they are responsible for their country, and we should hold them to it.
I think the Afghans are hopeless. They deserve destruction.
Did I? And that point was the new insights into the nature of today’s warfare made possible by this profound new concept? Rrriiighttt . . .
The problem with beltway buzzwords is they obscure more than they enlighten—by design. Placing new labels on old wine may dazzle neophytes (aka political appointees) and aid in gaining lucrative DoD contracts. Repeating them will make you appear au courant among E-ring ballerinas. Beyond that, they’re often as not a joke.
Here’s the military definition of asymmetric:
Do you really think using strategy and tactics to align strength against weakness, or to turn weakness away from strengths, would have seemed “very different” to Heinz Guderian? Patton? Tojo? Zhukov? I think not.
But, hey, if that’s what comforts you and helps you to sleep at night as your national leadership capitulates daily to murderous thugs, far be it from me to interfere with your slumber.
I’m not sure I follow. Do you mean that the Iraqi government has been too slow to have trials for anyone but the top level of government for crimes committed under Saddam? If you mean that they’re never going to happen then I disagree. We just haven’t gotten ourselves sufficiently clear from the transition yet (Maliki probably would have by now if left unmolested, but that probably wouldn’t have been a healthy thing; one wants the trials to be more like the ones that the current government is likely to hold after the ISIS crisis has passed than they would have been under the previous government). You often find that this is the way with these sorts of trials and that that results in something closer to justice than if everyone’s blood is still hot.
The Afghan government and the US government have been working together to try to prevent enemy organizations in Afghanistan committing atrocities. We haven’t been successful, but it seems like it would be unhelpful to kneecap our allies.
No one, or at least not a whole lot of people, chose to have Saddam rule them.
We toppled the last government that allowed AQ to operate comfortably within its borders, and we encouraged enormous numbers of people to die trying to oust Saddam (we then repeated that in Syria). Sadly, willpower and numbers are not enough when fighting dictators with Russian support; they needed arms and, ideally, airpower too.
It took a while, but we defeated Al Qaeda in Iraq. Some members left and joined ISIS, and now ISIS is being defeated, but ISIS was never a similar organization. We did arrest Iraqis we believed to be aiding AQ. Maybe arresting a bunch more would have been helpful, but it doesn’t appear to have been essential.
I find it helpful to remember how incredibly poor and ignorant Afghans are. It’s genuinely hard to make sound decisions about questions that you have no context to answer. If you’ve never been more than a few miles from your village, making the wrong call about who the bad guys are in a conflict that mostly involves people in countries you’ve never heard of and from countries you’ve never heard of seems pretty understandable. That said, the overwhelming bulk of the population seems to have made the right choice. Every city of any size is with the government.
As a separate issue, the benefit to America to winning in Afghanistan, to continuing support for the government there until it’s enemies give up, is not primarily felt in the moral good of helping some of the most unlucky people on earth (if being an American is to be a winner in the lottery of life, being an Afghan is something of the reverse). The benefit to us is that the next time we fight a war like this, people on the fence will know that we have the resolve to finish the war. When we take flight, as in Vietnam and Lebanon, our enemies reasonably infer that killing Americans is likely to cause America to abandon its allies. When we win, we let our enemies know that they can blow themselves up attacking us, or they can die trying, but that even if they succeed in murdering either civilians or soldiers no good will come of it. Individually, winning in Mali and Somalia, Libya and Nigeria doesn’t make that much difference, but cumulatively there’s an impact. Who wants to fund an organization that one knows won’t achieve anything good? Who wants to die for it, or compromise and make peace with it if it’s not going to be around for so long?
That has a domestic impact, too. Sadly, we can’t reduce problematic nutcases to zero, but we can reduce them.
@James of England
i think you are imagining what did or did not happen regarding the Iraqi and afghan governments. What I was suggesting is that we had no business creating those governments. We hadn’t even finished fighting and we had already allowed these corrupt politicians to make us their puppet government.
Why, when we are fighting Islamic terrorism, did we establish Islamic republics? We have no obligation to make all the people of the world free, but we have a moral duty to implant the Bill of Rights in any nation we conquer.
We had Iran surrounded and we let them operate quite freely instead of threatening them.
We should have finally done something about Iran and let Israel take on Syria back when we were strong and Russia was still afraid and weak.
As a free people, our greatest weakness is the attention span of our people. They will support any cost of war so long as they think it is necessary and we are serious about winning. We cannot fight multi generational wars the way we have. We need to fight total war and finish in four years. If we can’t justify total war, then we have no business fighting. Never in our history have we had a more urgent reason for war than after 9/11.
We spend hundreds of billions on this war while the enemy spends a couple million. That cannot be sustained.
Ahh, would that “better government” be the one that harassed and humiliated a street vendor, whose self-immolation resulted in the 23-year Tunisian regime collapsing almost overnight, and sparked the so-called Arab Spring?
Judgments about what’s “better” in Middle East governance always recall for me Jimmy Carter toasting the Shah of Iran for the “stability” he brought to the region. Then there was Secretary Clinton feting Assad and deposing Qaddafi. Or Obama welcoming the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. I’m afraid the Davos set doesn’t get this stuff right very often.
Your strawman is Obama-esque and suggests a level of strategic confusion similar to the President’s. To say that geo-strategy has not been made anew simply because of technology and globalized markets is not to argue that Germany is occupying Paris and Japan Manchuria.
Everyone misses the point on this matter. Modern terrorism is a response to the dictates of Islam. The way to preserve our civilization is to eliminate Islam. This being impossible, make the cost to Isalm intolerable. This could be done in a week.
A serious POTUS would declare war on Saudi Arabia, close the borders to Muslims, expel visiting Muslims and arrest a few imams in Dearborn and Newark. He would take out Saudi oil transfer facilities on Day 1. Now the money stops.
Day 2, offer peace when terrorism ends. Warn the world that every terror act against the West earns another Saudi city used for ICBM target practice.
Day 3, In response to the inevitable lone wolf attack, do it. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The Clash of Civilizations ends in a week, with us as winner. We have the resources; we merely lack the will.
The fact that it’s damned hard and that 100% security is unattainable does not mean we should have no effective border controls, play catch-and-release with MS13 members, or incentivize illegals with tens of thousands of dollars in benefits upon arrival, does it? That’s what I’m pushing back on—the ludicrous notion that if we can’t stop every determined terrorist from breaking and entering, we must continue leaving our back door unlocked and inviting them in. What sense does it make to kick doors in throughout the Middle East while our own doors are flung wide open?
Yes, I’m all in favor of an armed, alert, trained citizenry taking the fight to the bad guys when they pop up. But that’s the last layer in out layered defense—or should be.
Agreed. It’s also the layer that affects me and my family the most.
We created the vacuum enabling AQ to blossom in Iraq. Your premise turns on a false narrative.
By “finish” do you mean “win”? We already are on the path to finishing without victory. Only someone in a comfortable arm chair can so blithely suggest reversing that—who’s blood are you offering up?
Our elected CINC has spent eight years proving the exact opposite—that we precisely do not have “resolve” to win. Instead, he resolved to release captured illegal combatants so that they can return to killing the troops he commands. He recovered a lone deserter at the cost of five senior enemy leaders.
We elected this buffoon not once but twice. And your answer is now to send more kids to lose limbs and their lives so that we can reverse this clear expression of our abject lack of national will to win?
Do you have military-aged progeny your offering up for this insanity? Is ‘next-time-resolve’ worth that price to you? Or is this a good idea provided someone else picks up the blood-tab?
Let’s reinstitute the draft so ALL families can share the burden imposed by this stupidity.