"Occupation by Policy" - How Victors Inadvertantly Provoke Resistance Insurgency

[Dayuhan]

Personally think this is where Kilcullen was initially going in his ecosystem concept as a way to explain the chaos being seen but then he went no further.

The "ecosystem concept" does not in itself explain anything. That's not what it's meant to do. It provides a conceptual framework into which the unique details of a given "ecosystem" can be organized and perhaps better understood. Without the details there can be no explanation forthcoming, and the explanation coming out is no better than the accuracy and relevance of the details that go in. As a general rule, the broader and more general the inputs, the less valuable the output. The greater the extent to which the details are based on assumption or generalization, the less valuable the output.

Overall it's a potentially useful tool, but I wouldn't want to depend on it exclusively. Like most conceptual frameworks, it can be manipulated by controlling the information put into the framework, and it can be rendered useless if the information inputs are sloppy or based on assumptions or generalizations.

My observation of the discourse ecosystem in which we operate is that about 99.7% of the invocations of terms like "conflict ecosystems", "complex adaptive systems". "complexity theory", "quantum mechanics", "postmodernism", etc, ad nauseam, have minimal relevance to the construct referred to and are intended not to explain, but to identify those who invoke them with what are presumed to be cutting edge intellectual concepts. In short, they aren't meant to clarify, they are meant to make those who use them sound erudite, to position the user in a hypothetical inner circle, and avoid the risk of explaining something clearly. To use an expression Robert has been known to use, they are meant to complify, not simplicate. Buzzwords and jargon do not promote clarity, they obstruct it.

There is a movement among some analysts to look at this comment below again in trying to understand internal dynamics of a population as they shift in the face of their day to day reality and how that dynamic plays out then between the state that represents the population with other state represented populations. Basically it shuts out institutions and focuses on the population creativity in the face of reality.

For those of us who actually live in tn these populations, this seems like a rather... intellectually autoerotic approach to comprehension of our day to day reality. As always, the relevance of the output will depend not on the frameworks and systems developed by the analysts, or by the erudition of their buzzwords, but on the quality of the ground-level information they feed into the models. I don't expect much, but then I'm naturally cynical about what happens when analysts try to understand the edge.

Right now a perfect example of this edge of chaos is Egypt where the status quo is no longer, but what comes out is an unknown quantity because of the large number of components in play.

Outcomes are always unknown: we do not have crystal balls. Hence the need to avoid the hubris of thinking that involvement in a situation will allow us to control or dictate an outcome.