The Clausewitz Collection (merged thread)

[Surferbeetle]

Here are the areas, from Robert Martinage, Special Operations Forces: Future Challenges and Opportunities (CSBA 17 Nov 2008), Chapter 1. A Primer on Special Operations Forces, pp.28-30 (pdf) (simply cuz he sums each area with doctrinal refs, so JMM doesn't have to re-invent the wheel). Brief comments re: AQ after the quotes.

Mike,

Very nice, the Sun Tzu/Judo approach to your analysis is appreciated and worth reflecting upon.

I have been following your analysis across politics/religion (very difficult if not impossible to separate in some parts of the ME, and the US for that matter), causation and motivation over the last few days/months and it has sparked some thoughts on demographics, coherence of a group (both senses of the word), and capabilities. How does understanding the concept of value chain analysis apply to analyzing political/religious groups? Here are three links that might add to the discussion.

Microtargeting by Wikipedia

Microtargeting is the use by political parties and election campaigns of direct marketing datamining techniques that involve predictive market segmentation (aka cluster analysis). It is used by United States Republican and Democratic political parties and candidates to track individual voters and identify potential supporters.

Microtargeting's tactics rely on transmitting a tailored message to a subgroup of the electorate on the basis of unique information about that subgroup.

From FP Limbo World: Dispatches from countries which do not exist by GRAEME WOOD

This trend is a mess waiting to happen. The first worry is that these quasi-states' continued existence, and occasional luck, emboldens other secessionists. Imagine a world where every independence movement with a crate of Kalashnikovs thinks it can become the new Kurdistan, if only it hires the right lobbyists in Washington and opens a realistic-looking Ministry of Foreign Affairs in its makeshift capital. The second concern is that these aspirant nations have none of the rights and obligations of full countries, just ambiguous status and guns without laws. The United Nations is, in the end, binary: You are in or you are out, and if you are out, your mass-produced miniature desk flag has no place in Turtle Bay.

Encouraging states like Abkhazia to flourish and proliferate has created precisely the kind of second-class statehood, with uncertain rights and responsibilities in the international system, that diplomacy was designed over the last several centuries to avoid. The Peace of Westphalia established an international order of fixed boundaries in 1648 and made no provisions for the existence of functionally independent enclaves in Brandenburg-Prussia, say, that France could use for leverage. The whole point was to come to conclusions about what was sovereign territory and agree to knock off the warfare and ambiguity. That was in part for the welfare of those enclaves, so they were not trapped in uncertainty and used as proxies -- or worse, neocolonies -- by first-class states. But Limbo World suffers that exact fate today.

Throughout my travels in Limbo World, the conversation would often swing back to Uruguay, where a 1933 agreement was sealed that is today an article of faith to Limbo Worlders. The Montevideo Convention established a theory of statehood that treated countries like starfish, capable of surviving after having their limbs hacked off and able to sprout new and independent states from those hacked-off limbs.

It has come to be known as the declarative theory of statehood: the idea that a state is any entity with a fixed territory and population, and a government that can enter into relations with other states. Needless to say, if the letter of this convention, to which the United States is a signatory, were followed, nearly every country in Limbo World would immediately convert into full nationhood and every rebel group on the planet would be scrambling to print business cards for its hastily convened diplomatic corps. Like many sweeping declarations of foreign policy, the Montevideo Convention has been the victim of wise neglect nearly ever since its signing. Still, the opposite extreme in international relations -- giving existing countries a veto over every self-determination movement -- hardly recommends itself, and whatever happy medium exists between the two has not yet been reached.

Relevant to the topic?

From the 16 Jan 2010 BBC, Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt elects new leader

The Brotherhood has influenced Islamist movements around the world with its model of political activism combined with charity work.