Everything You Know About Counterinsurgency History Is (possibly) Wrong!

[William F. Owen]

Shalom Marc,

All fascinating - genuinely - but what correct me if I am wrong, but you are talking about these technologies, enabling behaviours. They are instruments. Radio changed warfare. It cannot change war. Same is true of I.P. technology.
None of them "created ideas." Protestants challenged the hegemony of the Roman Catholics, not the printing press.

Much the same is true of the observation that the motor car and the aeroplane symbolised, and inspired, Fascism but did not create it.

[marct]

Shalom Marc,

Right back at you ....

All fascinating - genuinely - but what correct me if I am wrong, but you are talking about these technologies, enabling behaviours. They are instruments. Radio changed warfare. It cannot change war. Same is true of I.P. technology.
None of them "created ideas." Protestants challenged the hegemony of the Roman Catholics, not the printing press.

You're quite correct that i am talking about these technologies enabling behaviours. Actually, i would go further and say that they changed the selection criteria (both positive and negative) for certain behaviours. Where I suspect we disagree is on the nature of causality. I view "causality" in an inductive format, i.e. by changing the frequency distribution of a particular behaviour, that technology has "caused" that behaviour to change. The social understandings at the time of those changes are the "ideas" which, since they are embedded in the change themselves, are "created" by that change. I know, it sounds post-moderninst, but it actually isn't .

I agree that it was the protestants that challenged the Catholic hegemony in Europe. However, let me note that it had been challenged earlier by "reform" movements internally (e.g. the Fraticelli, etc.), and by groups that just plain out rejected their hegemony either spiritual (e.g. the Cathars) or temporal (e.g. the Stedingers). The Protestants, as a collection of groups, certainly weren't the first but they were successful and, IMHO, one of the main reasons why they were successful was because of the spread of the printing press.

Cheers,

Marc

[William F. Owen]

Where I suspect we disagree is on the nature of causality. I view "causality" in an inductive format, i.e. by changing the frequency distribution of a particular behaviour, that technology has "caused" that behaviour to change.

OK, I can dig that, so the people make choices and act based on the information to hand. More information, more action. Makes sense, but how true is it today relatively?

A Few books to 1,000's of Books is a very great change - even with literacy at below 1%. No Radio to radio, is a big change, but less profound than books. Same for telephones. Has the Internet really changed human behaviour and politics in a decisive and profound way, as seen with books? - and books only really took off once literacy took hold.

Having said all that, my thinking has been profoundly and usefully effected by SWJ. I actually think 18 months here equates to 5 years on intense study in terms of getting from where I was to where I am, but I may be emotively overstating the case!

[marct]

OK, I can dig that, so the people make choices and act based on the information to hand. More information, more action. Makes sense, but how true is it today relatively?

It's really interesting - at least to me - how we react to changes in information systems. Let me pull that apart, 'cause otherwise I'll be using way too much academic shorthand....

Basically, I view information as a "difference that makes a difference" (Gregory Bateson's influence there....). All information is perceived via some form of sensory processing, which is inherently a communications loop - raw input comes from somewhere "out there", gets processed, decoded, processed against existing "meaning templates" for "difference" (amongst other things) and then stored/referenced against linguistic taxonomies. Where the technologies come into play, and where I see them as having a significant causal effect, is in the coding / decoding area, storage, and secondary communication.

A Few books to 1,000's of Books is a very great change - even with literacy at below 1%. No Radio to radio, is a big change, but less profound than books. Same for telephones. Has the Internet really changed human behaviour and politics in a decisive and profound way, as seen with books? - and books only really took off once literacy took hold.

Hmmm, let's think about this for a bit. When we look at early "literate" societies, say pre-1400, one of the things that becomes pretty clear is that the requirements for encoding / decoding (readin' and writin' in this case ), were originally really, REALLY, complex. It took about a decade to teach someone how to read and write in cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics, traditional Chinese pictograms, etc. One of the effects of this, and it was probably partly due to the fact that most writing systems were developed in "temples", was that "writing" was viewed as "sacred" - consider the Hebrew alphabet for one example.

Even later on, say during the first centuiry ce or so, most "writing" was mean to be spoken (this, BTW, has been forgotten by a lot of people; BTW, Harris' Ancient Literacy is great for a systematic analysis of this situation after the development of alphabetic writing). Books didn't really take off until after the development of the Gutenburg press which allowed for the cheap, rapid production of large print runs. Literacy, at least in the sense we now use the term, didn't really take off until roughly the same time, but not because of books - it was because of broadsheets (sort of a 16th century version of the tabloid press). The two, books and literacy, didn't really tie together at the level of general, popular culture, until the development of both cheap books and cheap education systems.

I don't know if it's possible to quantify differences in levels of effect of mass publications and the radio. One point I'll note is that the process of decoding radio is much simpler that learning to read - a point well know to and used by the Taliban. You don't need a cheap education system in order to deploy radio while still communicating with large numbers of people. Afterall, providing people with cheap transitor radios is a lot less expensive than setting up an education system!

One other key difference between the two is that with radio, there really isn't much of a storage mechanism beyong, say, recorders. The "messages" are immediate, and it is really quite challenging to go back and critically examine those messages at a later date; something that is simple with books. This means that whatever group controls the broadcasting "centre" can control the message.

Has the 'net changed the nature of politics? I don't know - I could argue both sides of the question. Honestly, i don't think we have enough data yet to say that it has or hasn't. Let me toss out a few exemplars in the afirmative.

Are you familiar with the United Breaks Guitars case (story, 1st video, follow up)? The use of 'net 2.0 technologies forced a major corporation to give in to a single person. In another example, less well know and not covered on CNN , Rogers cablevision decided that they were not going to carry WPBS from Watertown NY in Ottawa any longer. A facebook group was setup to oppose this decision, which they took without consultation. Rogers has, as a result of that and other efforts, now reversed themselves.

Where I see the 'net effecting our politics is in the realm of temporal immediacy. Basically, I suspect that the frequency distribution of indiviual efforts and collective action is conditioning our political actors (corporations, politicians, etc.) to react quickly to popular groundswells and embarassment. That's at a minimun.

I think that we could also look at how is has and is changing the geographical scope of warfare. For example, fairly cheap and sophisticated use of 'net 2.0 technologies enhance the probability of homegrown terrorism both by indoctrination (those interpretive templates i was mentioning earlier) and by providing do it yourself methodologies. Are these having a political effect? Yup - we can see it in the creation of DHS and in recent suggestions that Americans should be taught to spy on each other.

Having said all that, my thinking has been profoundly and usefully effected by SWJ. I actually think 18 months here equates to 5 years on intense study in terms of getting from where I was to where I am, but I may be emotively overstating the case!

LOL - definitely!!!!!

[Bob's World]

Changes in the rate and availability of information drive changes in governance, often through violent uprisings of a newly empowered populace.

The invention of the printing press sparked in information age that led to the Renaissance (growth of art and science), the Age of Discovery (western colonization of the world), and the Reformation (Radical Christianity used as ideology to overthrow the Holy Roman Empire's chokehold on Europe). Powerful stuff when the government loses control of information.

The invention of electronic communications contributed to the demise of the British Empire and as cell phones and internet communications democratize information even more is serving to empower populaces to rise up to challenge similar governments that draw their sovereignty more from external sources than they do from the populace of the region.

Washington can draw lessons from what happens when sovereignty is attempted to be exerted from Rome or London in the face of a populace empowered by new tools of information and avoid their fate, or it can ignore those lessons and share in their fate.

Never underestimate the attractive force of freedom on man to motivate him to take on the greatest challenge, or the empowering effect of information, both to make him aware that better options exist and to facilitate his ability to organize his Resistence movement to achieve it.

This is why I believe that the number one priority of the US's GWOT efforts (or deterrence of irregular threats efforts) is to understand and address or avoid such perceptions of inappropriate US legitimacy over the governance of others. Track a "foreign fighter" back to his home and you will likely find just such perceptions.

This is the challenge of our operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, as it is very difficult indeed to avoid such perceptions when one begins by taking down the existing government and replacing it with another. Sustained efforts to increase the effectiveness of those same governments only serves to increase the perception of US legitimacy over them. This not only makes them more susceptible to insurgency themselves, but the US more susceptible to attack from these insurgent forces who are apt to believe that phase one to any successful insurgency at home must be to break the source of this inappropriate external legitimacy.

A bit of a quandary, but to understand it is the first step in addressing it.

[Entropy]

BW,

I'd like to hear more about this deterrence of irregular threats. What kind of threats are you talking about specificially?