Move over, 82nd Airborne...

...you've got some dance move competition from your counterparts in Iraq. Judging be the, uh, innuendo in this video, I estimate that, at this rate, we'll see combat troops covering "It's Raining Men" sometime next week.



And you thought the military couldn't handle the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell". I can't wait to hear the command endorsement on this one.

Andrew Exum has the commentary at Abu Muqawama.

Links of the Weekend

Had a great weekend zipping around the Adirondack mountains in my open-topped Jeep. I needed to do this, as a complete absence of snow--even from the tops of the Adirondack Mountains--is unheard of for early April. In fact, it's not uncommon for kids in the Fort Drum area to search for Easter eggs in the snow.

With that said, I'm just now catching up on a few of the great links that came up over the last few days. The high points range from articles about General Petraeus to blog entries about Lady Gaga. A brief rundown:

• Sayyid Qutb can take a ride on a disco stick.

Andrew Exum (Abu Muqawama), made a few interesting remarks in response to an article by Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal. Exum echoed Stephens' sentiments that the Islamic resentment towards the Western world--and the United States in particular--is not entirely motivated by American policies in areas such as Palestine. Rather, much of the anti-Western sentiment in the Muslim world, according to Exum, is a backlash against globalization and seemingly-omnipresent Western culture.

That means Lady Gaga and Her Royal Hotness Megan Fox.

Others remain skeptical. At Foreign Policy Online, Thomas Hegghammer noted that, while some anti-American attitudes in the Muslim world are a response to western "decadence", support for terrorist organizations is not linked to American culture. Rather, says Hegghammer, al-Qaeda's recruitment tends to swell during periods of perceived injustice in Palestine, as does violence directed against Americans. (Foreign Policy's Daniel Drezner also weighs in on the issue). Indeed, they attack us for our foreign policy, not for our disco sticks.

Of course, the real expert on this issue is none other than the Great Satan's Girlfriend, whose amusing combination of valley-girl talk, foreign policy, military analysis, and pictures of chicks has given her just as many web hits from the sexually frustrated denziens of Middle Eastern countries as they have from the staff at the Washington Post. (Yes, much like that song from the Cardigans, GSGF is a site that we all look at, yet never admit to.)

The GSGF responds to the Wall Street Journal:

"The American girl knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs and she shows all this and does not hide it."

Direct Hit! Fire For Effect!

• General Petraeus in Vanity Fair.

The first I heard of Mark Bowden's (Black Hawk Down, Killing Pablo) Vanity Fair article on General Petraeus came in the form of several blog posts bashing the vignette (Attackerman, Ink Spots). Spencer Ackerman not only notes that much of Bowden's vignette seems ripped from Tom Ricks' The Gamble, but that Bowden fills much of the narrative with "sycophantic prose", crossing the line from journalism into legend-writing.

Granted, General Petraeus is quite an amazing person, and many of his exploits are the stuff of legend. He survived a bullet wound to the chest, only to leave the hospital a few days later, knocking out fifty push-ups on his way out the door. He also helped bring a wounded soldier out of a coma by shouting "Currahee", the cry of the 101st Airborne Division. Spencer Ackerman also readily admits to lauding his achievements. I'm certainly no better. In fact, I might have unintentionally contributed to the Petraeus mystique.

I've been getting quite a few visitors arriving from Mother Jones, specifically from an article by Nick Baumann. Baumann references a blog entry I wrote last summer, when General Petraeus was visiting my particular corner of the world: Contingency Operating Base Speicher, near Tikrit, Iraq. A few of us received word that the General's itinerary would take him through the dining facility (in typical military fashion, abbreviated "D-FAC"), and we positioned ourselves near the door to catch a glimpse of him. However, our informant seemed to not know the difference between a "D-FAC" and "D-Main" (the division headquarters, also at COB Speicher), where General Petraeus would actually be visiting. You can read the story in its entirety, but to make a long story short, we spent much of our time waiting for General Petraeus by re-wording all the Chuck Norris facts into General Petraeus facts.

Now it looks like someone actually did make a website of General Petraeus facts. Five hundred years ago, I'm certain students will think that Chuck Norris and General Petraeus single-handedly defended America from the ever-present zombie menace (Probably something like this).

To round-out the weekly update:

• Attackerman on Matt Gallagher's new war novel, "Kaboom". (A must-read for those frustrated with Army bureaucracy)
• Themistocles' Shade reminds us that the regular baseball season begins, linking to the best baseball movie of all time: The Naked Gun.
• And, finally, thanks to the US Naval Institute for allaying some of the hysteria surrounding "swarming" tactics (though I disagree), as well as giving us the following picture:

Weekend Roundup

• Is al-Qaeda on the run? Maybe. Pakistani forces narrowly missed Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's number two operative (and some say the real brains behind al-Qaeda) earlier this month. The Washington Post also reported that al-Qaeda's operations were in "disarray", with others noting that al Qaeda has sacrificed well-planned, spectacular demonstrations for more hastily-assembled plots.
• No more talks with the Taliban? Some reports have suggested that the recent arrests of Mullah Baradar and other Taliban leaders have practically nixed all chance of negotiating with less extreme Taliban elements. However, some commentators at Small Wars Journal speculate that Baradar's capture might have been a Taliban set-up all along.
• Congratulations to Michael C of On Violence, who guest-blogged at Tom Ricks' The Best Defense this past Friday. Contributing the weekly "Dog of War" story, Michael lets us in on the dirty little secret that many troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have unofficially adopted dogs, cats and foxes, in defiance of General Order #1, as they tend to keep the less savory cobras, mice and scorpions in check. In a few cases, Iraqi and Afghan dogs have been brought back to the US as life-long companions for American service members, as was the case of "Nubs", who stars in his very own book "Nubs: The Story of a Mutt, a Marine, and a Miracle".
• Bravo Zulu to Tom Ricks (you know, Fiasco and The Gamble), whose "The Best Defense" was named the best blog of the year by the American Society of Magazine Editors.
• The USNS Comfort, one of the US Navy's two floating hospital ships, returned to her home port of Baltimore this past weekend. The Comfort performed 843 surgeries during her Haiti deployment, over half occurring within the first ten days of her arrival in Port-au-Prince. Check out the US Naval Institute for some incredible pictures of the Comfort's exploits in Haiti, including some interesting artwork on the tail of this SH-60 helicopter.

• Thanks to Nathan Hodge of Wired.com for linking to this site in an article published this Friday in Wired.com's Danger Room. My web counter has been going crazy, and I've even seen people dropping by from "Chirp", a secure social networking tool used by the US Government's Intelink. (It even appears on Intelink's Twitter feed). Another great site that's been linking here recently is "1 Raindrop", a site which covers network security.
• Quote of the week: "Ali Farokhmanesh is the best Iranian since Mithridates"--Tucker Max's Twitter feed.
• Quote of the week honorable mention: "Everything I learned about the thumb drive ban came from Wired's Danger Room"--Reach 364. Dude, you think that's bad? I personally wouldn't have had a clue that USB drives were unbanned until I read it on the Danger Room.

South Park to take on Blackwater/Xe

You might remember this article from the Washington Independent's Spencer Ackerman regarding Blackwater/Xe's latest shenanigans in Afghanistan:

Blackwater personnel appear to have gone to exceptional lengths to obtain weapons from U.S. military weapons storehouses intended for use by the Afghan police...Blackwater on at least two occasions acquired hundreds of rifles and pistols from a U.S. military facility near Kabul called 22 Bunkers by the military and Pol-e Charki by the Afghans. Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of all U.S. military forces in the Middle East and South Asia, wrote to the committee to explain that “there is no current or past written policy, order, directive, or instruction that allows U.S. Military contractors or subcontractors in Afghanistan to use weapons stored at 22 Bunkers"...

....On one of those occasions, in September 2008, Chief Warrant Officer Greg Sailer, who worked at 22 Bunkers and is a friend of a Blackwater officer working in Afghanistan, signed over more than 200 AK-47s to an individual identified as “Eric Cartman” or possibly “Carjman” from Blackwater’s Counter Narcotics Training Unit. A Blackwater lawyer told committee staff that no one by those names has ever been employed by the company.

It gets even better when you check out a blog entry from Ackerman posted last night, where he recounted his experience sitting in on the Senate Armed Services Committee's investigation of Blackwater/Xe. How Spencer kept a straight face while asking this question is beyond me.

[Michigan Senator Carl] Levin gave some brief remarks introducing his findings but didn’t mention Cartman. I raised my hand and asked him if Blackwater actually used the name of a ‘South Park’ character to sign for the guns. Levin, bless him, appeared to be unfamiliar with ‘South Park,’ a sign that the universe works as it is supposed to. His staffers suppressed grins and calmly pointed out that no one with the name ‘Eric Cartman’ has ever worked for Blackwater, and I was free to draw my own conclusions.

I thought the world couldn't be any more surreal, but I was wrong. Spencer also goes on to inform us that art will be imitating life tonight as South Park tackles Blackwater/Xe. Comedy Central released this 10-second clip:

There are few things in life that actually make me speechless. Thanks to the Internet, though, I seem to be discovering them on a routine basis. Tune in tonight at 10 PM Eastern/9 PM Central on Comedy Central.

WOI Groupies: It's not too late...

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Links of the Day

Three excellent links for the day, courtesy of the milblogosphere:

1.) The new official blog of the USNS Comfort, the American hospital ship currently operating off the coast of Haiti. Really, there's not much to say about it other than the fact that you need to visit. There's only a few posts so far, but I expect the blog to get busy in the next few days.

2.) Michael Cummings of On Violence guest-blogged at Milblogging.com, with 12 tips for milbloggers. There's three particular rules I'd like to highlight:

8. Avoid Army Bureaucratic Language. The Army hates language. It chews it up and spits it out into some unrecognizable thing filled with too many adjectives (full spectrum operations) and acronyms (METT-TC). So do what you can to solve the problem. Avoid the stuffy language demanded during your day job when you go home at night to blog. If you have to use an acronym, remember to explain it to your readership.

This is probably one of the best pieces of advice for milbloggers. Good writers have difficulty adapting to mil-speak because it's, well, just plain bad. I recommend dropping most of the mil-speak and buying an AP Stylebook. Spell out the majority of your acronyms and write as if you're writing for the general public because, let's face it, it's the general public that we're trying to influence with blogs.

Milspeak is confusing, awkward, and in some cases, the vagueness of the language makes people suspicious. I could go on, but just check out "On Superfluous Adjectives", "Out of the Woodwork" and "Shout-Outs for Military Cliches" (The Best Defense) for more on this issue.

10. Learn Opsec. Avoid Opsec. This is kind of obvious, but it needs to be said.
- A great rule of thumb: if it involves numbers avoid it. So the number of men on a patrol, the time an attack occurred, or how long units take to respond should never go on a blog.
- Always avoid current or future operations. If it just happened, don't blog on it. If it might happen, definitely don't blog on it.
- It is not OPSEC but be cautious about breaking the news of wounded or killed soldiers. For courtesy to the family, please wait until the Department of Defense releases the information.

To this, I also want to add that, for the sake of the family, please don't give details of a service member's death. I've often wanted to talk about the impact that suicide might have on a unit, but I think it's best to wait a few years before I delve into that issue, for the sake of all involved. This ties into my third favorite rule:

12. Wait until you leave a unit to discuss that unit. The Kaboom blog is the best example of a blog shutting down because of outside pressure. Due to a variety of circumstances, Matt Gallacher's blog was ordered to close. I too worry about getting pressure to close down my blog. My solution is to wait until after I leave a unit before I write about it. This helped me on numerous occasions:
- Many times during deployment I felt frustrated, angry or just pissed. Posting in in these mindsets could have had a negative impact on my career and myblogging.
- I took over a job on a battalion staff a few months after we returned from Afghanistan. When things didn't go my way, I wrote blog posts about my frustration. When I read those posts now, I can choose the posts that actually offer my readers valuable information and throw out posts that are just rants.

Agreed. Critiquing professional military education (after you've left the course), counterinsurgency theory or military culture in general (e.g., PowerPoint) is one thing. In fact, I've even found flag officers weigh in on these sorts of articles--specifically, Admiral JC Harvey in the aforementioned PowerPoint article.

However, complain about your chain of command or your unit on a posting board or in a blog and you're risking UCMJ action. More than one Soldier is wearing a little less rank because a quick Google search for the name of a unit revealed derogatory comments. In many ways, this really is no different than the rules which govern blogging in the workplace--know when to separate work and play.

3.) You need to check out Captain Josh McLaughlin's (whom you know from the al-Sahwa blog) first article at Small Wars Journal. This article examines the various al-Qaeda (AQ) "spinoffs" such as al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP in Yemen), and their nature as either a franchise of the main al-Qaeda in the Afghanistan/Pakistan region or as a worldwide conglomerate. It's an excellent topic for those interested in the global struggle against al-Qaeda and affiliate groups.

Link of the morning is here...

An excerpt from Zenpundit:

There has been, for years, an ongoing debate in the defense and national security community over the proper place of COIN doctrine in the repertoire of the United States military and in our national strategy. While a sizable number of serious scholars, strategists, journalists and officers have been deeply involved, the bitter discussion characterized as “COINdinista vs. Big War crowd” debate is epitomized by theexchanges between two antagonists, both lieutenant colonels with PhD’s, John Nagl, a leading figure behind the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual and now president of the powerhouse think tank CNAS , and Gian Gentile, professor of history at West Point and COIN’s most infamous arch-critic.

In terms of policy and influence, the COINdinistas ultimately carried the day. COIN advocates moved from a marginalized mafia of military intellectuals who in 2004 were just trying to get a hearing from an indifferent Rumsfeld Pentagon, to policy conquerors as the public’s perceptions of the ”Surge” in Iraq (masterminded by General David Petraeus, Dr. Frederick Kagan, General Jack Keane and a small number of collaborators) allowed the evolution of a COIN-centric, operationally oriented, ”Kilcullen Doctrine” to emerge across two very different administrations. Critics like Colonel Gentile and Andrew Bacevich began to warn, along with dovish liberal pundits - and with some exaggeration - that COIN theory was acheiving a “cult” status that was usurping the time, money, talent and attention that the military should be devoting to traditional near peer rival threats. And furthermore, ominously, COIN fixation was threatening to cause the U.S. political class (especially Democrats) to be inclined to embark upon a host of half-baked, interventionist “crusades“in Third world quagmires.

Informed readers who follow defense community issues knew that many COIN expert-advocates such as Nagl, Col. David Kilcullen, Andrew Exum and others had painstakingly framed the future application of COIN by the United States in both minimalist and “population-centric” terms, averse to all but the most restrictive uses of “hard” counterterrorism tactics like the use of predator drones for the ”targeted assassinations” of al Qaida figures hiding in Pakistan.

Unfortunately for the COINdinistas, as George Kennan discovered to his dismay, to father a doctrine does not mean that you can control how others interpret and make use of it. As the new Obama administration and its new commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal conducted its internally contentious review of “AfPak” policy in 2009 on what seemed a geological time scale, the administration’s most restless foreign policy bigwig,the Talleyrand of Dayton, proposed using COIN as nation-building on steroids to re-create Hamid Karzai’s Afghanistan as the secure, centralized, state that it has never been. Public reaction to this trial balloon was poor and the administration ultimately pared down General McChrystal’s troop request to 30,000 men, hedging a COIN based strategy toward policy suggestions made by Vice-President Biden....

...COIN is an excellent operational tool, brought back by John Nagl & co. from the dark oblivion that Big Army partisans consigned it to cover up their own strategic failures in Vietnam. As good as COIN is though, it is not something akin to magic with which to work policy miracles or to substitute for America not having a cohesive and realistic grand strategy. Remaking Afghanistan into France or Japan on the Hindu Kush is beyond the scope of what COIN can accomplish. Or any policy. Or any president. Never mind Obama, Superman, Winston Churchilland Abe Lincoln rolled into one could not make that happen.

Association with grandiosely maximalist goals would only serve to politically discredit COIN when the benchmarks to paradise ultimately proved unreachable. Austerity will scale them back to the bounds of reality and perhaps a more modest, decentralized, emphasis. COIN will then become a normal component of military capabilities and training instead of alternating between pariah and rock star status inside the DoD.

Great article, but minus one point for not using the following Nagl/Gentile mashup:

(Just kidding, there can be a bit of both in US military policy)

Links of the Day

It's been a busy week, for certain. All I've had time for are a few links of the day:

The US Naval Institute Blog is leading the way when it comes to analysis of the disaster relief effort in the wake of the horrifying earthquake in Haiti this past Tuesday. Of particular note is their participation in the DOD Blogger's Roundtable, during which they discussed many of the logistical difficulties at Port-au-Prince Airport.

From having participated in disaster relief before, I think it's safe to say that if counterinsurgency is the "graduate level" of war, disaster relief earns one a PhD--the fact that there's a disaster to begin with indicates that something didn't go as planned in the least. More coherent thoughts on disaster relief to follow tomorrow.

Also, check out a new blog by Kings of War's Patrick Porter, entitled "The Offshore Balancer", which I'm currently adding to the blogroll (once I fix my blogroll widget, that is)

Mi-35 Hind Awesomeness

The Russian-built Mi-35 Hind (which is an upgraded Mi-24/Mi-25 helicopter) sees plenty of service in the fledgling Afghan Air Force. For those of you familiar with the Afghan War, this is exceedingly amusing, as Mujahadeen Rebels shot down Soviet Hinds in great numbers with US-supplied Stinger missiles during the Soviet invasion, courtesy of Charlie Wilson. Oh, how times have changed.

ISAF, in its attempts to help build a stronger security force for Afghanistan, has begun training Afghan pilots in the employment of the Hind, with Soldiers from the Czech Republic providing much of the training, as shown in this awesome video from Combined Security Transition Commad-Afganistan on Youtube (H/T ISAF on Facebook).

The Hind is a menacing, evil-looking attack helicopter, most famous for "starring" in a particularly harrowing scene from Red Dawn, where a a Hind (actually a modified SA-330 Puma helicopter) guns down American teenagers. It serves as the inspiration for the Clone Trooper gunships in the Star Wars films. It is also particularly notable as the first helicopter to participate in air-to-air helicopter combat, with Iraqi-piloted Mi-25s taking on Iranian helicopters during the 1980s.

Fortunately for us in the US Army Aviation community, the weight, size, and peculiar stubby wings (which are lift-producing, unlike those on America gunships) of the aircraft make it notoriously unstable in flight. In fact, an American AH-1 Cobra pilot, jockeying with a Soviet Mi-24 pilot on opposite sides of the West/East German border caused an Mi-24 to crash, as the cumbersome Mi-24 couldn't keep up with the more nimble Cobra.

Nevertheless, it's an interesting aircraft with a long combat history. Definitely check out the video.

Another link of the day...

You might want to drop by al-Sahwa to see an interesting article--the first of a series of articles--regarding al-Qaeda's nature as either a franchise or conglomerate.

Link of the Day

Thanks to Twitter (and Gulliver at Ink Spots, in particular), I came across a group known as Tech, Culture and Conflict, who has a Twitter feed. Apparently, they are a group of academics who are starting up a website regarding academics and the counterinsurgency environment.

I really like how the gap between academics and the military has seemed to narrow during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I think that both sides have benefited from working together. Let's help these men and women out with their web page and suggest a few good articles to help those from academia prepare for work in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If anyone from Tech, Culture and Conflict is reading this, would you benefit from a quick primer and introduction to the military?

PS--Gulliver, are you serious? "Love Bank" in division warfighting handbooks? I guess love and war really are alike. This is why Ovid's "Ars Amatoria" has such wonderful analogies between the battlefield and the bedroom...he really was the Tucker Max of his day.

Best Onion Story Ever

Ultra-Realistic combat game features awaiting orders, doing paperwork. Click the title to see the video.

Link of the Day

Thanks to Boss Mongo for letting us know that yesterday would have been the 95th birthday of Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr. Lamarr was notable not just for her acting abilities, but also for her work in the development of "spread spectrum communications" technology--the basis for modern frequency-hopping radios, as well as Wi-Fi networks.

I got beat to the punch...

The worst part about having a day job which prohibits blogging is that bloggers frequently beat you to the punch on some of the best articles.

Take this article from the New York Times, which appeared in SWJ's daily roundup--it's chock-full of unintentional funny (which has already been recognized by Andrew Exum and by the people at Ink Spots).

According to the article, an American company has sold the Iraqi Army 1500 bomb-detecting devices which cost tens of thousands of dollars apiece (ranging from $16,000 to $60,000). The only catch is that American bomb experts say that the devices are completely useless, and "work on the same principle as a Ouiji board". Yes, apparently, a company known as ATSC Ltd. is selling bomb-detecting equipment which is based on absolutely no known scientific principle whatsoever. This is about as laughably dishonest as a door-to-door mammogram salesman.

The Iraqis, on the other hand, claim that these work exceedingly well (despite a number of high-profile bombing attacks this week), although they really can't explain how they work. In what is perhaps the ultimate expression of the inshallah (Arabic for "God willing") attitude, an Iraqi general noted, "Whether it’s magic or scientific, what I care about is it detects bombs". I'll summon the spirit of Han Solo and note that hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good bomb-sniffing dog at one's side. Speaking of which, the New York Times article continues:

The Baghdad Operations Command announced Tuesday that it had purchased an additional 100 detection devices, but General Rowe said five to eight bomb-sniffing dogs could be purchased for $60,000, with provable results.

Checking cars with dogs, however, is a slow process, whereas the wands take only a few seconds per vehicle. “Can you imagine dogs at all 400 checkpoints in Baghdad?” General Jabiri said. “The city would be a zoo.”

Baghdad may have suicide bombers which have killed hundreds in the past month, but dogs are where we draw the line.

And finally, folks, your moment of Zen:

The Justice Department has warned against buying a variety of products that claim to detect explosives at a distance with a portable device. Normal remote explosives detection machinery, often employed in airports, weighs tons and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. The ADE 651’s clients are mostly in developing countries; no major country’s military or police force is a customer, according to the manufacturer.

“I don’t care about Sandia or the Department of Justice or any of them,” General Jabiri said. “I know more about this issue than the Americans do. In fact, I know more about bombs than anyone in the world.”

Yes, the Iraqi Army may be plagued by sectarian differences, and conduct mass porno raids, but by God, do they know bombs!

I'm not looking forward to 2010...

Your annual Halloween Spook-tacular

Greatest Halloween Prank Ever:

Links of the Day

Today's Link of the Day roundup:

• From Gizmodo: Liveblogging Couple May Have Been Captured By Somalian Pirates. (Somalian pirates, we!)
• What could be more eagerly anticipated than the revised DOD policy regarding social media? How about a revised policy regarding USB drives? Seriously, I hate burning CD-ROMs five to ten times a day. What is this, 1999? (H/T Karaka Pend)
• Congratulations to Pat O, an ROTC cadet in his last year of college at Georgetown University, who just discovered that he was branched infantry, which was his first choice. Pat, you are far braver than I!
• The Onion exclusive: US Continues Quagmire-Building Mission in Afghanistan. Pure genius (H/T Abu Muqawama)
• Spencer Ackerman reports that Nuristan province is almost completely under the control of the Taliban. Worse news, Taliban 2.0 has much stronger ties to al Qaeda than Taliban 1.0, which is one reason I oppose complete abandonment of Afghanistan.
• Finally, you may remember a quick article I wrote while I was hung over on R and R leave in Australia about the BigDog, a walker-like robot suited for the terrain in Afghanistan. (The article got picked up by the Early Bird--the Pentagon's official news wire. God, their standards must be low). Well, look out BigDog, here comes a two-legged walker variant called "Petman". While the technology probably isn't workable for an actual battle droid just yet, I think that in the next thirty or forty years, we might see robotics technology like this really take off. (I eagerly await my Cylon Model Six).

Links of the Day--Sci-Fi Edition

My biggest task since getting back has been cleaning out my Google Reader cache. Fortunately, I found some great links, especially today.

1.) First of all, I'd like to note that Tom Ricks found the article that Adam Elkus and I wrote the other day regarding science fiction and military theory particularly interesting. (By the way, Tom, Adam was the one who used the term "speculative fiction", so props to him). Tom Ricks had the following to say:

I liked their review of the issue, but came away wanting to read more about the related issue of fiction that doesn't appear to be about a given war, or perhaps any war at all, because it is disguised. One obvious example is one they mention,Starship Troopers, which I think is not really about outer space but really about World War II in the Pacific, with the inhuman enemy crawling out of holes in the ground. Even more distant from the war it is about, I think, is Doctor Dolittle, which I think is about World War I. If I recall correctly, it began as letters written home then by Hugh Lofting, who served with the Irish Guards. In a world of trench warfare where men lived like animals, in holes in the ground, Lofting effectively lived in a world of talking animals.

Additionally, Mr. Ricks commented on my collection of links regarding his theory that light infantry commanders were more well-suited to counterinsurgency than armored commanders, which we'll call the "boots beats bolts" hypothesis (phrase coined by Kings of War, as near as I can tell). (Note: the aforementioned post also contains references to crack whores in Fayetteville, NC).

2.) While we're on the topic of science fiction, I also found an interesting link which noted that, according to nearly 10,000 stolen passwords from Hotmail, the most popular password seemed to be the following. You might want to get a pen out, as it's hard to remember. Here it is:

12345

Are you kidding? That's the stupidest password I've ever heard! It sounds like the password an idiot would put on his luggage! Yet, its the most common password on Hotmail.

3.) More science fiction news: Adam and I felt that the use of lightsabers represented a "legacy failure"--simply superimposing ancient technology in a futuristic world. Well, this week, we've been proven wrong. Seems Special Operations Command is releasing a new portable "plasma knife" this week for use in surgery.

I now know what I want for Christmas.

Big Trouble in Little Mexico

Today's link-of-the-day post is a tag-team from Adam Elkus (writing at Red Team Journal) and Greg Milsaps regarding the security threat down south. Very little analysis will follow this because, well, I'm kind of lazy today and want to get back to reading War 2.0: Irregular Warfare in the Information Age. Hey, we're about to go home--we've got that last-day-of-school mindset right now (but seriously, be safe).

First, AE notes the following regarding the encroachment of Iranian influence in Latin America (and, although he doesn't specifically say Venezuela...yeah, Venezuela)

Granted, US room for maneuver in [Latin America] is very small. Like in Mexico, residual distrust of the US impedes a more active role in combating the threat. But the threat is real and serious thought should be devoted towards managing or containing the expansion of Iranian influence. The first–and most important–step that must be taken is to ascertain the nature of proxy penetration in Latin America. At least in the open source there is little concrete information about the extent of foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) in Latin America, and a great deal of rumor and conjecture about the tri-border region, Mexico, and Iran.

The next is a collection of links from Goyo (Greg in Mexico) at The Suppliants. There are a number of great articles here, so I'm just going to quote him:

"America Fiddles in Asia While Mexico Burns on Our Very Border," @ Fabius Maximus

"Mexico: Emergence of An Unexpected Threat," @ STRATFOR Global Intelligence

"A 'New' Dynamic in the Western Hemisphere Security Environment: The Mexican Zetas and Other Private Armies," @ the US Army's Strategic Studies Institute

"Desertion, Low Morale, and Readiness: Assessing the Mexican Army's Involvement in the War Against the Cartels and Its Impact on Capabilities for Traditional Responses," @RGE Monitor

You, Sir or Madam, are awesome indeed...

You know, you think you've done well when you get links from Small Wars Journal, Tom Ricks, The Early Bird, The Mudville Gazette, Omnivoracious, and Thunder Run. But nothing could prepare me for these links from Fark.com. Okay, only the password-protected portion of Fark.com, but it's still awesome. I always wanted to create something so bizarre it wound up on Fark (having already conquered CollegeHumor.com).

Thanks to whomever submitted these links to Fark! Anyway, without further ado:

[Some Operator] ["Silly" tag] This Halloween, "Children in the Fort Bragg area will be conducting trick-or-treating operations."

[Some Insurgent] ["Amusing" tag] Viewed through the lens of counterinsurgency doctrine, blowing up Alderaan was a huge blunder in the Empire's battle against the insurgent Rebel Alliance

[Some Ass-Man] ["Interesting" tag] The greatest defense against al Qaeda ass bombers may be snark and mockery. Do, it Farkers. Do it for America

Chapter XVI: Whether it is better to fear or love butt bombs...

The US Naval Institute’s blog carries a number of fascinating posts—some regard naval history, some regard the nature of 4GW and the OODA loop. And then, we have some which primarily regard the use of what the authors refer to as “butt bombs”.

A little background: A recent al Qaeda plot involved the attempted suicide bombing of Saudi Arabia’s counter-terrorism minister. The attacker hid the explosives not in a suicide vest, but rather, as some news sources refer to it, in his “anal cavity”. The attack was ultimately unsuccessful; with the attacker eliminating himself from the gene pool after a fellow al Qaeda operative sent him a text message, detonating the cell phone-triggered explosives, and left the counter-terrorism minister shaken, but not stirred. Al Qaeda must be running out of ideas—this was used in the last Batman movie, The Dark Knight—only without the bomb in someone’s ass. The Joker, as you will recall, detonates a bomb hidden inside someone’s chest cavity after being granted his phone call, facilitating his escape. (The guys at Defense and the National Interest have a great analysis of that movie’s application to 4GW.)

When we first heard about this, we responded with raucous laughter, and we even made a little song about the event. Seriously, the lyrics were “Let’s have some fun, this beat is sick/I wanna take a ride on a dynamite stick”. Okay, it’s not exactly that original, sue me.

Anyway, the USNI quotes Dr. Mike Waller of politicalwarfare.org on the potential IO spin we could potentially put on al Qaeda’s use of anal explosives:

Al Qaeda has flummoxed security experts with its new tactic of evading detection systems by hiding explosives and detonators inside the bodies of suicide bombers.

The method redefines what it is to be an “assassin.”

The new trick came to light last month in a Saudi palace when an Al Qaeda operative, claiming to want to surrender, exploded in a failed attempt to murder the Saudi prince in charge of counterterrorism operations. The terrorist stuffed a pound of explosives and a detonator up his behind (or perhaps one of his buddies did it for him) in order to foil bomb detectors.

What I’m about to propose is gross and disgusting and downright insensitive. But it’s culturally appropriate. And it’s a quick, inexpensive way to see if we can damage terrorist recruitment and neutralize this new and dangerous Al Qaeda murder tactic. So here goes.

Rather than get alarmed about lacking the technical means to detect such bomb smugglers, we should use Arab and Islamic (and generally universal, lowbrow, adolescent) cultural traits to make terrorists too ashamed and embarrassed to turn their bottoms into bombs. And to humiliate their supporters.

This tactic is begging for ridicule. Terrorists hate being ridiculed. Sexually repressed young men hate being ridiculed. Islamist extremists hate being ridiculed. Mockery stains their honor. Most terrorists are sexually repressed Islamist extremist young men.

Therefore, it’s time for the US and its allies, as well as the Saudis, to turn on the laughs by making fun of the butt-bombers. We can all think of ways to ridicule these weirdos in English – oh, the metaphors are just too plentiful and too crude to list here – and the Arabic language is likewise awash in backdoor humor. To say nothing of Pashto.

It does make for an interesting IO spin, to be certain. There’s nothing like ridiculing your enemies’ gross incompetence and maybe even nominating them for a Darwin Award—particularly when it involves something that’s so comically sexually humiliating. But is the author over-estimating the level of embarrassment involved by playing up the gay angle? After the collapse of the Taliban, the custom among Afghan warlords to have a young boy in their service commenced again. Indeed, I believe it was Peter Bergen who reported that, during the Afghan Civil War, two warlords fought a battle with tanks over who had the rights to a young boy. The custom seems to have mixed favor throughout the Muslim world, with nations such as Iran out-right banning gays, on one hand. On the other hand, T.E. Lawrence reported that the Hejaz chapter of MEMBLA seemed to be alive and well among some Bedouins, at least during World War One.

Nevertheless, relentless ridicule is a simple, effective way to de-legitimize al Qaeda, especially when combined with their ever-increasing unpopularity as a result of the massive collateral damage they create.

Focus: Create your own IO spin on the AnalBomber. Do it for NATO.