Strategy in the 21st Century

[Bob's World]

Bob,

Where we sometimes disagree is over the following statement.



Some the VEOs are waging a war within a single political system, many are waging a global jihad with ambitions to change political systems external to their country. To your point about power shifting between states, and power shifting to super empowered individuals and groups, I agree. Some of these non-state groups are waging war against the U.S. and our allies. Attempting to solve this challenge by addressing local governance issues will not work. We have to recognize the type of conflict we're in, and not confuse everything with traditional Cold War COIN/FID models. At the same time, we can't paint with too broad of brush, because not every group employing terrorism if part of this global jihad movement.

Bill, I suspect we disagree less than you might imagine on this. Obviously we do not live in a black and white world. Rare is the conflict that is purely "within" or "between." Most are a fusion of both. And yes, this new breed of VEO that the core groups for ISIS and AQ are prime examples of, conduct global UW campaigns in very state-like ways (but without the burden of state-like vulnerabilities).

Many in recent years have conflated these UW campaigns by slapping AQ or ISIS prefixes onto dozens of disparate revolutionary movements around the globe. That totally confuses the nature of those individual movements, as well as the character of the overall campaign. That is why I have long advocated for abandoning the reactive, symptomatic logic of CT and adopting a C-UW approach that focuses on the strategies, campaigns and alliances of these organizations.

By recognizing that the drivers of resistance insurgency are unique from the nature of the drivers of revolutionary insurgency it allows us to design more comprehensive campaigns that recognize that distinction and are designed to address both from the top down (as well as dealing with the UW efforts of state and VEO actors seeking to leverage both to their advantage).

Many have argued in places like Afghanistan that the problem must be solved from the bottom up. The problem is, that at the "bottom" there is no way to know the motivations of the fighter before you. Also, most of these places are broken from the top down through bad policies and poor governance.

Historically, when state power could routinely trump and suppress popular power, there was little need to make a distinction between revolution and resistance. After all, the "win" was defined as the state remaining uncoerced and the insurgent defeated. That was no true win then, and is even less of a win today. Time to put a finer point on our thinking.