Posts Tagged ‘military’

RAND, the American think-tank, has released a systematic study of historical fights against terrorist organizations ranging from the Oklahoma City bombers to Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers to Al-Qaeda in Iraq. The examination concludes that a “war on terror” is a mistaken approach to beat a distributed, insurgent enemy. Instead, in most scenarios a policy of smart policing and intelligence gathering is the best to defeat terrorism.

According to the analysis, overwhelming military might is only effective “Where opponents are large, organised like armies and occupy territory, military methods are likely to be more effective.” Such cases as Colombia’s FARC deserve traditional battle techniques, but only 20% of insurgencies are beaten through military assaults.

Forty-three percent, the largest quantity, of terrorist entities which ended their violence did so due to acceptance into the political process. Forty percent were beaten through traditional police and intelligence work.

This supports the analysis done in “The Starfish and the Spider” which recognizes that distributed networks cannot be beaten through centralized attacks. Current American counter-terror policies, however, try to do just that. The report’s authors suggest that the United States treat the terrorists as criminals, not warriors. “”The United States has the necessary instruments to defeat al Qaida, it just needs to shift its strategy and keep in mind that terrorist groups are not eradicated overnight.”

Paul Starr’s history of media is getting better with the page:

“…the long absence of military concern from communications policy may have helped to create the lead in telecommunications in the first place. In early nineteenth-century continental Europe, the original military conception of the telegraph impeded its commercial development. Security-minded telecommunications policies tended to militate against easily accessible, widely distributed networks, distorting both allocational priorities and architectural choices, to the disadvantage of long-term growth. A mere tool of civil society and local commerce, the telephone originally had little appeal to the military, in particular, and to the state, in general. States that were strong relative to civil society did not invest heavily in telephone service. That was the case in the major European states compared to America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Similarly, the far greater domination of the state over civil society in the Soviet world helps to explain its lag relative to the West in the development of the telephone during the twentieth century. As World War I illustrated, wartime state support could generate technological innovation in communications. But it is one thing to have individual spin-offs from military projects, and quite another to have a framework for communications shaped by state-security concerns.

Although the Pentagon’s research division, DARPA, played an integral part in the creation of the net, it has developed in large part without military control. Civil society has made the Internet the amazing tool it is today, but that may be changing. Nations across the globe are developing plans to militarize the Internet and see it as an integral part of future war-making. In the USA, the Air Force has created a central command for cyberspace and has plans to continue down the path of framing the Internet’s development as a security question. Is it inevitable? Has the Internet developed enough in civil society that state control won’t harm it?

Paul Starr’s history of media is getting better with the page:

“…the long absence of military concern from communications policy may have helped to create the lead in telecommunications in the first place. In early nineteenth-century continental Europe, the original military conception of the telegraph impeded its commercial development. Security-minded telecommunications policies tended to militate against easily accessible, widely distributed networks, distorting both allocational priorities and architectural choices, to the disadvantage of long-term growth. A mere tool of civil society and local commerce, the telephone originally had little appeal to the military, in particular, and to the state, in general. States that were strong relative to civil society did not invest heavily in telephone service. That was the case in the major European states compared to America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Similarly, the far greater domination of the state over civil society in the Soviet world helps to explain its lag relative to the West in the development of the telephone during the twentieth century. As World War I illustrated, wartime state support could generate technological innovation in communications. But it is one thing to have individual spin-offs from military projects, and quite another to have a framework for communications shaped by state-security concerns.

Although the Pentagon’s research division, DARPA, played an integral part in the creation of the net, it has developed in large part without military control. Civil society has made the Internet the amazing tool it is today, but that may be changing. Nations across the globe are developing plans to militarize the Internet and see it as an integral part of future war-making. In the USA, the Air Force has created a central command for cyberspace and has plans to continue down the path of framing the Internet’s development as a security question. Is it inevitable? Has the Internet developed enough in civil society that state control won’t harm it?