Kontent Review

I would like to expand upon several posts I have made in the past regarding the military situation in the Middle East. They will be appended to this post.

In boxing one adapts one's strategy to the opponent. One of the classics is a shorter, stockier boxer fighting someone with a greater reach. The shorter fighter must make the fight inside to nullify getting jabbed from a distance. Take away the advantage. Draw the opponent into clinches, the ropes, and a short range game. Use the leverage "inside".

Below, in a post, I outlined how our CIA perfected this strategy militarily in Afghanistan against the Russians. The Russians had the shock and awe of superior weaponry and greater mobility. To nullify this advantage the CIA increasingly provided better and better weapons to offset each Russian weapon advantage or each new strategy. The History Channel show provides actual footage of how this was done and it is narrated by the actual CIA station chief that provided the weapons and the strategy. The goal becomes obvious- to make the Russians "bleed". The opponent, Russia, was too big to "lose" but eventually not strong enough to survive a thousand cuts and inside "jabs" and uppercuts. Watching, helping, perfecting all of this was a young bin Laden. What did he learn? He learned that one should always keep the enemy "close" and use the ring to your advantage. You don't slug it out in the middle of the ring. Draw the enemy into the corners and use the ropes. Sucker him into the terrain that favors your game. Kabul and the two Soviet-built air bases are in the open. Leave them alone. Too hard to infiltrate in the night (to use urban guerilla tactics). The task was to always draw the Russians away and into the mountains and the passes. This is where a "low tech", hit-and-run (rock and roll) strategy works. The real purpose in the strategy was to politicized all the folks that just wanted to stay out of the way- not get killed (worthy objective IMHO). To do this the muhjadeen had to get the Russians mad enough to systematically overreact. Maximize the Russian frustration and thereby maximize the collateral damage. The Russians eventually were the occupiers and evil. 25M folks wanted them out. Good, bad, or indifferent. The people- get us back to the good days where we could occasionally shoot each other over something important- like drugs/money or religion. Nowhere to hide.

~4 years ago I saw a cartoon that sent a chill up my spine. It was bin Laden sitting is a dusty camp in Afghanistan and asking some ragged guys something like- "how can we get out of this dump and have some real training for these recruits?"

Well, we all know how Russia left Afghanistan (and anyone knowing much about history knows that Afghanistan has NEVER not defeated any invader since Alexander the Great). The real defeat for Russia was at home. The folks there (the Mother's Marches) losing their kids lost patience and lost hope. (Same story going on in Chechnya at the same time and even today.) It has since come to light that one of the primary goals of the Russian military (lessons learned) was how could one lure the USA (or perhaps a China?) into a similar position (quagmire) and then low-tech support that enemy? Let's see now...who were the heroes and architects of our defeat and how did they do it? How does one exploit long-standing tribal and religious/sectarian grudges? How do you exploit simmering civil wars? How did they use the terrain and the people against us? Who is tormenting us now all across our southern border? Duh...(Did we learn anything at all!)

"Rock and Roll" is the future. Rock and roll can whoopass high-tech shock and awe IF (the big IF) one can keep that longer armed opponent tied up inside and out of the middle of the ring. Long enough for the "people" to turn against the "invader". (The Crusader?)

I have posted dozens of times the Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla. The original used in Brazil to try to overthrow the government there. It has morphed over time into newer more refined versions and into Arabic and dozens of languages. It is appended below. If you cannot use the (typically) mountainous terrain to your advantage, you have to take your fight inside the largest cities. These techniques are itemized in the minimanual.
The real goal here is to get the opponent to use shock and awe by the high-tech military as a SUBSTITUTE FOR THE POLICE. Create a military reaction to the frustration of rock and roll that forces high-tech and high casualty events by the military.

KEY- The whole, entire world accepts the necessity of "police" primarily because they are made up of "locals"- people you know, people that speak your language, and because you want "safety"/order. Nowhere in the world do the people like the military performing "police functions".
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Things to ponder from a MILITARY view

1) Afghanistan- gotta be one of the greatest ironies in all of military history! The USA has learned nothing from what we taught the Russians. The only things controlled there now are Kabul and the two former Soviet air bases. About 1% of Afghanistan. The President (Mayor of Kabul) never leaves the city without a US escort. The ongoing civil war there between the former Northern Alliance parties, the drug-lords, and the Taliban/Pushtan alliance only await our "leaving". Or we can stay.

2) Iraq- the civil war there hasn't waited for us to leave. Our own State Department and DOD both estimate the number of al-Qaida fighters at between 200 and 700 at best. Identification of the nationalities of those killed put foreign "insurgents" at 1%. An article on suicide bombers is appended below. My belief as to who is supporting the various military factions and arms supply action there is appended below- (short summary- "just about everyone" INDIRECTLY)

3) Israel/Syria/Lebanon- Hezbollah, Hamas, etc.have studied the above. I believe the game here is the same game. How do you get the opponent to use high-tech shock and awe to create collateral damage in the people? They, the Islamists, have largely failed for years (militarily) to invoke sympathy with their using targets inside Israel. The military goal again is to force the enemy/Israel to use their military as a police force.

4) Turkey/Kurds/Kurdistan- both militaries preparing

5) Pakistan/ISI- (a bullet away and) military buildup

6) Iran- military buildup. Same strategy- draw the opponent in close. After, and/or during, the shock and awe be prepared to rock and roll. Get the opponent's ships into the Strait where the missile defense systems are vulnerable. Close to shore and no over-the-horizon advantage. Go with thousands of low-tech options and forget high-tech.

There is a program on the History Channel about Milt Bearden and the CIA in Afghanistan. The History Channel blurb is the following:

"Heroes Under Fire

When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, one of his top priorities was to do something about the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan. The solution was to send CIA operatives into the occupied nation to train resistance fighters. HEROES UNDER FIRE revisits the secret operation, which was based out of the CIA's field office in Islamabad, Pakistan. Discover how Milt Bearden and his team of CIA officers gradually built a network to funnel arms and cash into Afghanistan and train the rebels to fight."

http://store.aetv.com/html/product/index.jhtml?id=74803

This program, above, details weapon by weapon how the insurgency in Afghanistan was given "just enough" to counter each Russian advance and how each of the Russian technical advantages was met and nullified. RPGs, large mortars, satellite targeting, SAMs, etc. I very highly recommend you try to see it. Why? So you can understand what is really happening in Iraq..........

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All countries, all larger corporations, and virtually all large political organizations have a security and "military" and espionage arm. It is pretty straight forward for countries- they are labeled armies or military services and intelligence organizations. For larger corporations they are labeled security. For political organizations it is of course murkier :) - most are covert and some are overt. The overt have names like "security forces," militias, body guard's, etc.

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The United States has many opponents. Wholesale and retail. The most obvious are a very few countries that are almost seemingly wholesale BUT within the vast majority of all other countries there are cliques or retail opposition. There are many Islamic based organizations that have the same wholesale and retail opposition to the United States. Clearly al Qaeda and a few other extremist organizations have a wholesale approach. Others, the vast majority, have a retail approach.

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Back to countries. One outstanding "conflicted" example is Pakistan's ISI. Clearly there are elements that want the US "outta there" which is balanced with an element that finds the US useful in providing modern arms. If one reads about the ISI, one finds that perhaps half of its budget (income) comes from the government and the other "half"(?) apparently comes from the drug trade. And folks wonder about Pakistan's "commitment"?...

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So to the main point.

Who are the "insurgents" in Iraq? Where do they get their support? Where do they get their arms and explosives? Where do they get their money? Where do they get their specific "expertise" and experts in terrorism? Where do they get their intelligence? Where, where, where........For me the answer is pretty obvious. It comes from ALL OVER THE WORLD ... piecemeal.

I believe there is, as an example, a Chinese "station chief" somewhere that has a covert mission and money and means to INDIRECTLY make the US "bleed" in Iraq. I believe there is a Russian "station chief" somewhere with the same mission. The list goes on and on and on through the various, primarily Islamic organizations.

The goal is not to "defeat" the US in Iraq, it is to follow the US CIA's example in Afghanistan in the 80s - make the military "bleed". Cause discontent at home. Divert military spending. Squander big money on a lost cause. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera... ( I hope you get to see the History Channel's show)

History never really repeats, but it often rhymes...

It was no news to Tetlock, therefore, that experts got beaten by formulas. But he does believe that he discovered something about why some people make better forecasters than other people. It has to do not with what the experts believe but with the way they think. Tetlock uses Isaiah Berlin's metaphor from Archilochus, from his essay on Tolstoy, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” to illustrate the difference. He says:

Low scorers look like hedgehogs: thinkers who “know one big thing,” aggressively extend the explanatory reach of that one big thing into new domains, display bristly impatience with those who “do not get it,” and express considerable confidence that they are already pretty proficient forecasters, at least in the long term. High scorers look like foxes: thinkers who know many small things (tricks of their trade), are skeptical of grand schemes, see explanation and prediction not as deductive exercises but rather as exercises in flexible “ad hocery” that require stitching together diverse sources of information, and are rather diffident about their own forecasting prowess.


A hedgehog is a person who sees international affairs to be ultimately determined by a single bottom-line force: balance-of-power considerations, or the clash of civilizations, or globalization and the spread of free markets. A hedgehog is the kind of person who holds a great-man theory of history, according to which the Cold War does not end if there is no Ronald Reagan. Or he or she might adhere to the “actor-dispensability thesis,” according to which Soviet Communism was doomed no matter what. Whatever it is, the big idea, and that idea alone, dictates the probable outcome of events. For the hedgehog, therefore, predictions that fail are only “off on timing,” or are “almost right,” derailed by an unforeseeable accident. There are always little swerves in the short run, but the long run irons them out.

Foxes, on the other hand, don't see a single determining explanation in history. They tend, Tetlock says, “to see the world as a shifting mixture of self-fulfilling and self-negating prophecies: self-fulfilling ones in which success breeds success, and failure, failure but only up to a point, and then self-negating prophecies kick in as people recognize that things have gone too far.”

("hedgehogs"- anyone recognize the description in any of our leaders? Posters? :) )


Hedgehogs and Foxes