Hearts and Minds?

[Francois Boudreau]

We've got to be a bit cautious regarding this book..lots of good stuff, but the conclusions are sometimes facile...

I'm not knowledgeable enough to argue over Vietnam, but I find the idea of contigent incentives very interesting. Like others, I have doubts about the impact of random acts of kindness. Even economic development is suspicious, especially if the other side can provide it too. As mentionned, survival is prime. If I was living in a country with an insurgency, I would just duck and wait for the storm to past. Unless it's clear to me that it's in my personal interest to take risk and support one side. So I think it's important to remind the population why they should join your side instead of staying passive, and when possible to create incentives for them to join.

I'll check Dynamics of Defeat when I have a chance. I'm shipping for boot camp soon so my free time will colapse I fear.

It's in this area that AQ and the Muslim Brotherhood have been so successful. They have created an international "I/O" campaign, for want of a better phrase, that is highly suited to the current economic reality of many people. This is also one of the places where the Western nations have fallen flat on our collective faces.

Can you expand on this, I'm not sure I understand. Especially the link with the economic reality of those people.

[marct]

Hi Francois,

Can you expand on this, I'm not sure I understand. Especially the link with the economic reality of those people.

Sure. The basic idea is that cultures are centered around how their members make their livelihoods - with a time lapse. This tends to define what are key resources or wealth. In agricultural societies, that tends to be land, while in manufacturing / industrial societies it is machinery/labour/capital. What happens when the general form of livelihood is based on "knowledge" / information processing - the construction of "meaning" loosely construed?

Basically, the MB is a fairly classic example of a type of group called a "revitalization movement" (the term was coined by A. Irvin Hallowell). These types of groups are usually found when one meaning structure collapses, and they all hearken back to a mythologized "Golden Age". They also usually, although not always, impose a form of "thought control" on their members and attempt to impose it on their environment.

Okay, so we are now in an international economy that is centered on control of certain types of raw materials and on the manipulation of "data" to produce "knowledge" - basically an information economy. We also have a group that is predisposed towards forms of thought control, and a global cultural situation where older meaning structures have pretty much collapsed and new ones are not fully articulated (the shift from the Industrial economy to the information economy in the West, etc.).

This is the short form of what I was talking about . I'll be writing this up in longer form over the next couple of months, but that's the basic idea -AQ, which is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, has an expectation that hey will be engaged in a for of symbolic warfare as well as kinetic operations. They have a coherent ideology (aka symbol system), salafaism or wahhabi Islam, that they define as the "Truth". There is a very poor opposition to this ideology since little of it is articulated in a way that can be understood by most people, so AQ is able to create an I/O campaign that is always two steps ahead of the West.

Marc

[Merv Benson]

Their information campaign is pretty effective when they are on the attack, but it was woefully inadequate when the Taliban were being over thrown and when Ethiopia was roaring through Somalia. Zawahiri's scramble to urge jihadis into Somalia came at a point when the remains of his allies were backed into a corner by the sea in Ras Kamboni.

There is a lesson here in the ineffectiveness of information ops in the face of sustained use of force.

[Bill Moore]

It is premature to speculate on the outcome of the conflict in Somalia, and we only defeated the Taliban conventionally, they are now coming back in force unconventionally. I think IO is still critical for a sustained victory.

[ilots]

Their information campaign is pretty effective when they are on the attack, but it was woefully inadequate when the Taliban were being over thrown and when Ethiopia was roaring through Somalia. Zawahiri's scramble to urge jihadis into Somalia came at a point when the remains of his allies were backed into a corner by the sea in Ras Kamboni.

There is a lesson here in the ineffectiveness of information ops in the face of sustained use of force.

I don't thing you could have read that in a way further from the truth. Their IO was almost none existent during the fall of the Taliban, however their IO has had amazing effects in the post OEF invasion period - as the increase of insurgent relevance (and operations) has reflected. Likewise, "Hey, Jihadis head to Somalia" really is NOT an IO campaign. If any lesson should be learned (as we also learned in OIF) is that IO must be incorporated as early as possible to be effective, not as a post operation action, emergency action, or stop-gap - the idea is to alter the battlespace prior to the battle. Further, the global propogation of the jihadist ideology, even among disparate groups, is a reflection of the effectiveness of their IO ability.

I would further opine, as history has shown (and in Somalia the future also likely will) that in the "face of sustained force" (as we used in OIF and OEF) IO is critical to a terrorist organization and/or insurgency when it comes to maintaining their ideology, legitimacy, relevance, support, and core movement, in spite of tactical defeats.