The last two weeks have seen a storm of insurgent activity in Nigeria: Shell’s onshore output has been halved to around 140,000 barrels a day, Chevron has lost about the same again (taking the aggregate output lost to over to a fifth of Nigeria’s total) – and for the first time Lagos has been attacked.  According to Africasia.com,

Fighters from the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) attacked the facility, the first strike in Nigeria’s economic nerve centre since the oil insurgency was launched in 2006. Rescuers said five people were burnt beyond recognition in the blast.

“The militants went into open shooting with the naval officers guarding the facility but they were overpowered. They used dynamite to destroy the manifold,” said Geofrey Boukoru, a member of the emergency rescue team.

The militants arrived in four speed boats, exchanging fire sporadically with the navy for about three hours before hurling dynamite into the facility, said a senior official from the Pipelines and Products Marketing Company, an affiliate of the state-run petroleum corporation.

The Lagos attack took place just before the federal government’s planned amnesty release of Henry Okah, the head of MEND – a release that, in the event, still went ahead despite the attack.  MEND has since said in a statement that it “considers this release as a step towards genuine peace and prosperity if Nigeria is open to frank talks and deals sincerely with the root issues once and for all” – although as Abubakar Momoh of Lagos State University observes to AlJazeera, “What the government has done in the case of Okah is like treating the symptom and not curing the disease … there are issues that drove the militants to the trenches. Until those issues are resolved in a fair and just manner, there will never be peace in the Niger Delta.”

As David noted back in November last year, counter-insurgency expert John Robb has called Henry Okah ”one of the most important people alive today, a brilliant innovator in warfare”. Here’s Robb’s account of how Okah did it. (more…)

William Lind is (along with Martin van Creveld) the godfather of fourth generation warfare theory, so it’s worth sitting up straight when he publishes his 300th On War column and decides to distil the lessons of the previous 299 columns down into three points.  Here they are, together with his conclusion:

1. So long as America pursues an offensive grand strategy, Fourth Generation war will ensure her defeat. The reason is Martin van Creveld’s concept of the power of weakness and its intimate relationship with legitimacy. In a Fourth Generation world, legitimacy is the coin of the realm. At root, Fourth Generation war is a contest for legitimacy between the state and a wide variety of non-state primary loyalties. American power lacks legitimacy because, on the physical level, it is so overwhelming. That is the power of weakness: anyone who stands up to the American military becomes a hero. In turn, any state the American military supports loses its legitimacy. The more places America intervenes militarily, the more states lose their legitimacy, to the advantage of Fourth Generation, non-state entities. In effect, we have a reverse Midas touch. Only a defensive grand strategy, where we mind our own business and leave other states to mind theirs, can break us out of this downward spiral.
2. Second Generation militaries cannot win Fourth Generation wars. Second Generation armed forces, such as those of the United States, fight by putting firepower on targets. This wins at the physical level, but as it does so it brings defeat at the moral level, which is decisive in 4GW. The best current example is Pakistan, where the combination of Predator strikes and arm-twisting of the Pakistani government has undermined the legitimacy of the Pakistani state. That state now stands on the verge of disintegration, which would give al Qaeda and other Islamic 4GW forces the greatest victory they could imagine. The image on Osama’s cave wall should be a Predator, with the title, “Our best weapon.”
3. There is no chance America will adopt a defensive grand strategy or reform its military to move from the Second to the Third Generation – a necessary though not sufficient step in confronting 4GW – so long as the current Washington Establishment remains in power. That Establishment is drunk on hubris, cut off from the world beyond court politics and thoroughly corrupted by Pentagon “business as usual,” which knows how to buy whatever political support it needs. Like all establishments, it sees any real change as a threat, to be avoided. So long as it reigns, nothing will change.

What are the implications of these three observations? Militarily, they portend continued failure and defeat. We will fail to get out of Iraq before the next phase of that war begins, or, worse, an Israeli attack on Iran costs us the army we have in Iraq. We will be defeated in Afghanistan, because we will refuse to scale our strategic objectives to what is possible and we will continue to alienate the population with our firepower-intensive way of war.

We will push Pakistan over the brink into disintegration, which will be a strategic catastrophe of the first order. We will ignore the disintegration of the state in Mexico, while importing Mexico’s disorder through our ineffective border controls. We will not even be able to stop Somali pirates. What does it say about us when the whole nation rejoices because the U.S. Navy, the most powerful navy on earth, defeated four Somali teenagers?

It does not end with this. These foreign policy failures and military defeats – or even more embarrassing “victories” – become just two of a larger series of crises, including the economic crisis (depression followed by runaway inflation), foreign exchange crisis (collapse of the dollar), political crisis (no one in the Establishment knows what to do, but the Establishment offers the voters no alternative to itself), energy crisis, etc. Together, these discrete crises snowball into a systemic crisis, which is what happens when the outside world demands greater change than the political system permits. At that point, the political system collapses and is replaced by something else. In the old days, it meant a change of dynasty. What might it mean today? My guess is a radical devolution, at the conclusion of which life is once again local.

That would be, on the whole, a happy outcome. But I fear this will be a trip where the journey is not half the fun.

I’ve been visiting Pakistan on and off for a couple of years now – and each time things have got much, much worse (see this bleak assessment from 12 months ago).

Now the country has been plunged into further crisis. The Mumbai attacks put new pressure on its fractious relationship with India. The shootings in Lahore have severed its sporting links with the rest of the world.

These are calculated attempts to isolate and destabilize the country – attacks that have been planned by people who understand how to probe a culture’s weak points, and are skilled in the art of systems disruption.

They have consistently achieving outcomes disproportionate to the resources invested. But have we – the West I mean – done the same?

Here’s six questions I’d like to have the answer to. They all relate to the the country’s army, which is a dominant force in Pakistan’s politics and economics – and is an institution that has iconic status, even though it is losing legitimacy and respect.

Today, the Pakistan army finds itself in a strikingly similar position to that of the US military in Iraq before the surge. It is fighting a series of interlinked insurgencies. And it is losing badly – mostly because it’s fighting the wrong war.

So:

1. How much money are the UK and US channeling to the Pakistan military?
2. What proportion strengthens Pakistan’s ability to fight 20th century wars?
3. And what proportion is directed at counter-insurgency and 4th generation warfare?
4. Has a systematic and concerted attempt been made to pass the lessons learned in Iraq onto Pakistani senior and mid-level officers?
5. If so, is there evidence that strategy is switching from targeting militants to protecting Pakistan’s people (perhaps the fundamental COIN tenet).
6. And given that all modern armies boast about their commitment to outcomes (or effects based operations), what outcome has the UK and US’s vast post-911 investment in the Pakistan military delivered? 

Wildcat strikes have gone viral in the UK – oil, power and nuclear workers have all walked out and the government is scrambling to get the situation back under control.

No panic buying as yet, but if the strikers push a little harder, we might see signs of a systemic disruption.

Of course, no 4th generation strike would be complete without an online presence – Twitter doesn’t seem to be playing much of a role as yet, but there are a number of bulletin boards out there. Bear Facts is one that’s providing coordination for an otherwise highly distributed action:

This site has been specifically designed for engineering construction workers i.e. Welders, Platers, Erectors, Pipefitters, Mechies, Scaffolders etc for the purpose of improved communication and the sharing of information.

We all know how hard it is to keep in touch with what’s going on in this game when we all work on different sites across the country.

Action is now taking place nationwide. Demonstrations are taking place outside sites from Teeside to Wales. Scottish workers have downed tools and taking part in demonstrations in support. The government is being lobbied by the trade unions, in other words…the gloves are off and the fight is on!!!

Of course, half of those registered on Bear Facts are probably infiltrators (both journalists and spooks) – informal SMS networks are probably carrying most of the sensitive information, as they’re so much more secure.

A few days ago, I did a post on the UK government’s current horizon scanning exercise – part of the process leading up to its second National Security Strategy – in which I suggested that “the really stand-out risk that barely got a mention in the events I attended was the possibility that serious erosion of states’ capacity and legitimacy [will undermine] their ability to respond to all the global trends that we were discussing”. 

As regular readers will know, that observation comes straight out of the writings of ‘fourth generation warfare’ theorists like William Lind, Martin van Creveld and John Robb.  But what may come as more of a surprise is the interesting revelation that Kaiser Wilhelm II made a similar point yesterday in his birthday conversation with Lind*:

“My generation of kings and emperors were fixated on the age-old contest between dynasties. Would the houses of Hapsburg and Hohenzollern defeat those of Romanoff and Savoy or the other way around? We could not see the paradigm shift welling up all around us, the onward rush of democracy and equality and socialism and all the rest of that garbage. What we needed was an alliance of all monarchies against democracy. Instead we wiped each other out, putting the levellers in charge everywhere, to the world’s ruin.”

“Does that hold any lessons for our time?”, I asked.

“From Olympus, the picture could not be more clear,” His Majesty replied. “As we were mesmerized by dynastic quarrels, so your politicians cannot see beyond the state. They think only of states in conflict. Will America be threatened by China? Should India go to war with Pakistan? Is Iran a danger to Israel? They cannot see that states are now all in the same, sinking boat, just as all the dynasties were in 1914.”

“What should states then do?”, I enquired.

“Form an alliance of all states against non-state forces, what you call the Fourth Generation,” the Kaiser answered. “The hour is late, and the state system itself has grown fragile. That is the lesson of America’s quixotic war in Iraq. You destroyed the state there, and now no one can recreate it. That is what will happen almost everywhere when states fight other states. But none of your leaders can see it, because they, too, are time-blinded. It is the human condition.”

* Since you ask: in addition to being one of the top experts around on counter-insurgency and fourth generation warfare, William Lind is also an ardent Prussian monarchist.  Consequently, he marks the birthday of Kaiser Wilhelm II (“my reporting senior and lawful sovereign”) with a column each year in which he records a conversation with that leader’s ghost.  Previous editions are highly recommended – e.g. here and here.

For Lind et al (writing in their draft field manual), 4th generation warfare is about fighting an idea rather than fighting for territory (in Afghanistan, the Soviets failed because they ‘could not operationalize a conflict where the enemy’s strategic center of gravity was God’).

Fight an idea with conventional weapons and you often fail. ‘Every physical victory,’ Lind says, ‘may move you closer to moral defeat.’ So how do you win when strength itself can be an Achilles heal?

Lind draws the idea of a ‘moral defeat’ comes from John Boyd, the fighter pilot and godfather of contemporary military theory. For Boyd, third generation or manoeuvre warfare (think WW2 blitzkrieg) is all about using speed, ambiguity and innovation to confuse, disorient and then break the enemy. (more…)

William Lind rates John Boyd protégée, Major Donald E Vandergriff, almost as greatly as he despairs of the US army’s ability to change:

I would like to think the Army’s leadership would take Vandergriff’s books, including Raising the Bar, turn to their subordinates and say, “Make it happen.” But I know it won’t happen.

All that can happen is what the Army has seen a million times: the slogans and buzzwords change, but the organizational culture remains Second Generation, so everything else that is real does too. Faced with new ways of war demanding that it change or die, the Army will prefer to die, because it’s easier.

Vandergriff, too, writes off “people who already have had their character defined and shaped by… today’s leadership paradigm.”

In his 2006 monograph, Raising the Bar, he calls for a revolution from below, seeded by a new generation of leaders who can outthink enemies whose goal is to “defeat the mind and destroy the cohesion of the opponent’s decision makers through any means possible.” (more…)