Economic Warfare Strategy

[tequila]

The Communist Party of India (Marxist) has actually ruled West Bengal state in India for over 30 years, winning successive elections repeatedly. Lately it has embraced foreign investment and have, ironically, faced much armed opposition from the Naxalites.

PM Manmohan Singh has called the Naxalites "the single biggest internal security challenge ever faced by our country", which is a pretty big declaration given India's long history of insurgencies.

edit: Decent Economist summary of the Naxalite movement in its most recent incarnation, with a good mention of how a "popular" movement of anti-Communist militia has sprung up and escalated the level of violence in the countryside.

[Ski]

And then there are the Nepalise Marxists as well.

[Jedburgh]

And then there are the Nepalise Marxists as well.

...if you have the opportunity to go back and look at actions during their operational peak, they offer an IED study that is distinct from that in Iraq. But the conflict there has quieted down significantly, although there are still issues.

Good background on those guys from ICG, 18 May 07: Nepal's Maoists: Purists or Pragmatists?

Nepal’s Maoists have changed their strategy and tactics but not yet their goals. In 1996 they launched a “people’s war” to establish a communist republic but ten years later ended it by accepting multiparty democracy; their armed struggle targeted the parliamentary system but they are now working alongside their former enemies, the mainstream parties, in an interim legislature and coalition government. Their commitment to pluralistic politics and society is far from definitive, and their future course will depend on both internal and external factors. While they have signed up to a peaceful, multiparty transition, they continue to hone alternative plans for more revolutionary change....

[Merv Benson]

This could well be a leftest group, but I think they may have some new friends. When you consider Chavez's hostility toward Mexico and the US and his "strategic partnership" with Iran as well as bringing in the new central American leftists into that partnership, it is very possible that this is an indirect attack on the US energy supply by two countries who want to drive up the cost of oil. Iran has certainly used proxies in the past to achieve its objectives and I would not rule out its involvement at this time. Since the US is Pemex's best customer, I think it would be a mistake to rule out the involvement of Iran and Venezuela, especially on the funding end.

[marct]

Hi Merv,

This could well be a leftest group, but I think they may have some new friends. .... Since the US is Pemex's best customer, I think it would be a mistake to rule out the involvement of Iran and Venezuela, especially on the funding end.

Hmmm, possible, but there is also the interesting note that there were no casualties. That is a little closer to the other types of popular leftist uprisings, eg the Zapatistas. The money may be filtering in, but I suspect that it is purely a marriage of convenience if it exists.

Marc

[Bill Moore]

Merv,

In today's world it is easy for numerous groups with different agendas to network and support each other where there are common points of interest, or a profit to be made. Unfortunately with our current myopic view of strategic threats to the U.S., if you're not an Islamist you just don't make the list, no matter how hard you try (sorry North Korea). So what do we do, we automatically draw illogical links to Islamists, so we can draw attention to a problem. I think our nation's leaders have led much of America into a dangerous group think dynamic, where we're all extremely paranoid, thus we see the evil hand of Al Qaeda or Iran everywhere. What makes it worse is in most cases it "could" always be true to some degree, so it is hard to disprove. Sort of like WMD in Iraq, or AQ ties to Iraq, prior to our 2003 launch of OIF. I remain amused why educated men (and women) cannot collectively think rationally.

I think a communist insurgency in Mexico (without any Islamist influence) is a threat to our national interests on a number of levels. If it spreads (others were relatively easily defeated/suppressed) it could lead to increased legal and illegal migration, humanitarian issues, a hostile, or least not friendly gov on our southern border, etc. It is way to soon to make any claims like this, because this movement could be a flash in the pan, but the point is we have to look at all potential threats to U.S. interests, not just Islamists (which I know wasn't your point).

Bill

[Jedburgh]

...I have no idea what the return on investment was from this attack yet, and we probably never will get accurate figures, but it should be a few million dollars worth of bang for the buck. Not only is there lost production, damage to the pipeline that needs repaired, but a huge investment in deploying security forces in an attempt to secure the pipeline.....

Gas pipeline attack in Mexico forces factories to shut down

....At least a dozen companies including Honda Motor Co., Kellogg Co.'s, The Hershey Co., Nissan Motor Co., and Grupo Modelo SA were forced to suspend or scale back operations because of the lack of natural gas, the daily newspaper Excelsior reported. They said they faced millions of dollars in losses.

Vitro SAB, a Mexican company that makes glass containers, said the shutdown of two plants would cost it about $800,000 a day. Vitro said in a statement that it was increasing production at other plants in Mexico to minimize effects on customers.

Total business losses were being estimated at more than 70 million pesos ($6.4 million) a day, Excelsior reported, citing unidentified sources. The association representing Mexican industry said Wednesday it was looking into the extent of the explosions' financial impact....

[Nat Wilcox]

From Barnett's book review at

http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblo..._we_trust.html

I think John's dissection of guerrillas inside the Gap is very powerful, but that when he cites--by extrapolation--similar capacities for system disruptions and system perturbations in the advanced world, he doesn't prove his case very well. Again, to me, his argument there reminds me of Marx's description of capitalism getting to a certain stage and then just collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. Keeping a failed state failed is not the same as crippling a functioning state with a growing economy. If it were, they'd be revolutions going on all over the Core regularly, when in reality change and adaptation is achieved more smoothly than John believes any nation-state capable of, even following huge expansions of technology like we've just endured again, but certainly not for the first time, in America's history.

Where John's criticism of states makes more sense to me is inside the Gap (I don't see states "hollowing out" inside the Core like John does--indeed, the most globalized states have the biggest and best and most powerful governments). There I do think his guerrillas can rule, under certain circumstances, by negation. But in the Core, by and large, I see these guerrillas as more nuisance than all-encompassing threat, so John's ROI arguments don't rock my boat, because the vast majority of such efforts by bad guys will never rise above the everyday noise level of routine failure and breakdowns, and when they do, they force change that's beneficial in far more ways than simply defeating terrorism, so the notion of being bled dry by guerrillas is--to me--unconvincing.

Perhaps this has a certain wisdom in it. Let's suppose you added up the average yearly losses in the United States due to natural disruptions of our various networks (electricity grids, etc.) by tornados, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc. Ignoring the intervention in Iraq, which I think most people here regard as a self-inflicted wound, just how much damage has AQ done per year within the U.S.? Is it equal to that done by natural causes?

Robb seems to believe that many of our networks are brittle. How brittle are they, really, in percent terms? This shouldn't be too difficult to estimate: Our power grids are hit regularly all over the country by lightning, wind, ice storms, etc...these random insults are probably less costly than targeted ones, but still it would give us some quantitative sense of what economic resilience has already been built into such networks.

I bet relevant estimates exist. I will ask some colleagues.

It dawned on me that lastdingo was arguing something similar to what Robb says above toward the end of this thread:

http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...ead.php?t=3395