Wampum

via Chuck Thorton's IntlSecurity, via Jeff Lewis' Arms Control Wonk, something worth keeping and reading and re-reading. There are information operations references.

Approved by Russian
Federation presidential edict on 5 February
2010

Russian Federation President
in Russian

President of Russia in Russian -- Official website of the Russian Federation president: http://kremlin.ru/

I.  GENERAL PROVISIONS

1.  The Military Doctrine of the Russian Federation (hereinafter the Military Doctrine) is one of the fundamental strategic planning documents in the Russian Federation and constitutes a system of the views officially adopted in the state on preparations for armed defense and on the armed protection of the Russian Federation.

Continue reading "The Military Doctrine of the Russian Federation" »

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One of the advantages of growing up inside the NPGS was having access to unclassified material that only the geek would grok. I'd this, and other works by Claude. Quoting from the rare book dealer where I found the image:

"The immediate source of inspiration for Claude Shannon's information theory was his work on cryptography at Bell Labs during World War II. Shannon's theory of communication grew, paradoxically, out of organized attempts to intentionally prevent effective communication from occurring (that is, his work on cryptography).” As Shannon once explained, "During World War II, Bell Labs was working on secrecy systems. I'd worked on communication systems and I was appointed to some of the committees studying the cryptanalytic techniques. The work on both the mathematical theory of communications and cryptology went forward concurrently from about 1941… I started with Hartley's paper and worked at least two or three years on the problems of information and communications. That would be around 1943 or 1944; and then I started thinking about cryptography and secrecy systems. There is a close connection; they are very similar things, in one case trying to conceal information, and in the other case trying to transmit it”. (Rogers and Valente "A History of Information Theory in Communication" in Schement and Ruben, ed. Between Communication and Information, 39-45).

Shannon’s initial report on secrecy systems appeared first in a Bell Labs classified memorandum dated 1 September 1945 and titled, “A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography.” After the war, it was declassified and revised and published as the present paper, “Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems.” Shannon’s paper “provided, for the first time, a well organized theory of cryptography and cryptanalysis” and is generally regarded as the foundational work in the field (John R. Pierce, An Introduction to Information Theory, 272).

Offprint from: Bell System Technical Journal, vol. 28, pp. 656-715, October 1949. New York: American Telegraph and Telephone Company, 1949. Quarto, original printed wrappers with punched spine holes. Mild soiling to wrappers, otherwise fine. Scarce in offprint form. $2900.

Modern crypto is 60 years old this month.

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More interesting tidbits from the May 12th report by the Senate Committee on Armed Services.

Assured funding for certain information security and information assurance programs of the Department of Defense (sec. 214)

The National Security Agency (NSA) and the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Network and Information Integration (ASD/NII) have attempted for a number of years to persuade the Office of Management and Budget to establish a budget line item for information assurance anticipatory development within the Department of Defense (DOD). While these efforts have not been successful, the committee believes that the arguments in favor of such a program are compelling.

The information technology (IT) industry is the most vibrant and rapidly evolving industry in the world. The Department attempts to acquire or make use of these commercial IT advances to achieve efficiencies and improved operational effectiveness. However, DOD cannot effectively adopt this technology if it cannot be used securely, yet the Department has no appropriate mechanism for keeping pace with the march of technology development.

There is, for example, an outstanding requirement for a very high speed Internet Protocol encryption capability, but NSA has almost no resources with which to respond. The executive branch recently had to launch a satellite that lacked encryption for a key wideband downlink. The Advanced Extremely High Frequency Satellite program was delayed because of a belated encryption subsystem development effort. These types of requirements can be anticipated and, with modest funding, security solutions can be developed to match acquisition schedules.

The committee recommends a provision that would impose a permanent 1 percent tax on the Department's information systems security program, other information assurance programs, and the non-National Intelligence Program-funded cyber security initiative to finance this new program.

The committee directs that the program be executed by NSA's Information Assurance Directorate unless otherwise specified by the ASD/NII. The ASD/NII shall review and approve expenditures under this program. The committee urges the administration to vitiate the need for this statute-based funding mechanism by submitting its own budget request for this activity.

Cyber attack mitigation technologies

The budget request included $109.5 million in PE 62702F for applied research on command, control, and communications technologies. The September 2007 Defense Science Board study entitled `Mission Impact of Foreign Influence on DOD Software' highlighted the need for `programs to advance the state-of-the-art in vulnerability detection and mitigation in software and hardware.' In support of this finding, the committee recommends an increase of $2.5 million for the development of systems to detect and defeat malicious software on military networks and information systems.

Reconfigurable securing computing

The budget request included $56.9 million in PE 63203F for development of advanced aerospace sensors. The Air Force and Department of Defense have set cybersecurity as a high technology priority. To support these efforts at the tactical level and reduce the costs for the development of security systems, the committee recommends an increase of $2.0 million to develop reconfigurable secure computing technologies for advanced sensor systems.

When the USG relaxed the Federal Information System Procurement Standards, eliminating the POSIX barriers to Microsoft's propriatary operating system product, it created the Microsoft monopoly. There won't be a non-monopoly until there's a market for competing product -- hardened *nix in the base USG FIPS mix. Until then, another $2.5 million plus or minus random budget and defense policy walk, for bandaids for recurring road rash from pervasive use of a (single, shared fate) wobbly trike.

I'm amused by the launch-sans-crypto outcome, and the additional amounts sought, 1% and $2.5 million and $2.0 million for anticipatory capability, monitoring development, and operational agility are oddly small, given the size of the overall cybersecurity budget previous post) of $17.0 billion.

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The program was established by National Security Presidential Directive 54/Homeland Security Presidential Directive 23 (NSPD-54/HSPD-23), in January 2008, three months before Rod Beckstrom, who now joins us as ICANN's CEO, was appointed to run the newly created National Cyber Security Center, reporting directly to DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, a post he bailed from twelve months later.

Implementation of the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI), which was established by President Bush in National Security Presidential Directive 54/Homeland Security Presidential Directive 23 in January 2008, continues at this time. President Obama in February 2009 ordered a complete review of U.S. Government cybersecurity programs, including the CNCI, by the National Security Council/Homeland Security Council (NSC/HSC). The NSC/HSC review is to be completed and recommendations reported to the President in mid-April 2009. The CNCI will incorporate any changes recommended by the NSC/HSC review and approved by the President at that time.

The Senate Armed Services Committee had the following unclassified statement. I've added emphasis not in the original:

[...]

National cyber security initiative

The committee applauds the administration for developing a serious, major initiative to begin to close the vulnerabilities in the government's information networks and the nation's critical infrastructure. The committee believes that the administration's actions provide a foundation on which the next president can build.

However, the committee has multiple, significant issues with the administration's specific proposals and with the overall approach to gaining congressional support for the initiative.

A chief concern is that virtually everything about the initiative is highly classified, and most of the information that is not classified is categorized as `For Official Use Only.' These restrictions preclude public education, awareness, and debate about the policy and legal issues, real or imagined, that the initiative poses in the areas of privacy and civil liberties. Without such debate and awareness in such important and sensitive areas, it is likely that the initiative will make slow or modest progress. The committee strongly urges the administration to reconsider the necessity and wisdom of the blanket, indiscriminate classification levels established for the initiative.

The administration itself is starting a serious effort as part of the initiative to develop an information warfare deterrence strategy and declaratory doctrine, much as the superpowers did during the Cold War for nuclear conflict. It is difficult to conceive how the United States could promulgate a meaningful deterrence doctrine if every aspect of our capabilities and operational concepts is classified. In the era of superpower nuclear competition, while neither side disclosed weapons designs, everyone understood the effects of nuclear weapons, how they would be delivered, and the circumstances under which they would be used. Indeed, deterrence was not possible without letting friends and adversaries alike know what capabilities we possessed and the price that adversaries would pay in a real conflict. Some analogous level of disclosure is necessary in the cyber domain.

The committee also shares the view of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that major elements of the cyber initiative request should be scaled back because policy and legal reviews are not complete, and because the technology is not mature. Indeed, the administration is asking for substantial funds under the cyber initiative for fielding capabilities based on ongoing programs that remain in the prototype, or concept development, phase of the acquisition process. These elements of the cyber initiative, in other words, could not gain approval within the executive branch if held to standards enforced on normal acquisition programs. The committee's view is that disciplined acquisition processes and practices must be applied to the government-wide cyber initiative as much as to the ongoing development programs upon which the initiative is based.

The committee also concludes that some major elements of the cyber initiative are not solely or even primarily intended to support the cyber security mission. Instead, it would be more accurate to say that some of the projects support foreign intelligence collection and analysis generally rather than the cyber security mission particularly. If these elements were properly defined, the President's cyber security initiative would be seen as substantially more modest than it now appears. That is not to say that the proposed projects are not worthwhile, but rather that what will be achieved for the more than $17.0 billion planned by the administration to secure the government's networks is less than what might be expected.

Finally, the committee concludes that, for all its ambitions, the cyber initiative sidesteps some of the most important issues that must be addressed to develop the means to defend the country. These tough issues include the establishment of clear command chains, definition of roles and missions for the various agencies and departments, and engagement of the private sector.

Additional information on the cyber initiative is contained in the classified annex to this report.

[...]

The non-utility of keeping the program highly classified is not that it fails to deter enemies or inspire friends, but that it fails to function. As for dumping a big part of $17.0 billion on prototypes and concept development, that would be fine if the program were ARPA and actual research and development standards were met. Otherwise it may be closer to white-collar welfare for the beltway security service sector, and as much a crock as the Y2K frenzy was. The hiding of a substantial portion of the "foreign intelligence collection and analysis" budget in the "Cybersecurity" package is unsurprising corruption, for which some Executive Service pay grades should end up doing time in Club Fed.

"Engagement of the private sector" ... Does that mean turning about a billion shared-fate DOS devices into something slightly less tempting to every actor needing a force multiplier? Does it mean turning most of the access networks into something slightly less tempting to the same force multiplier shoppers than many open loops of many open devices? Could it mean securing the domain name, or the address allocation, delegation trees, so that synthetic resolution, and synthetic routing, artifacts are slightly less available than at present? If only it were so.

Kudus to the Federation of American Scientists which FOIA'd the material.

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Strategic bombing has been a failed military concept for ninety years, and yet air forces all over the world keep on doing it.

John Arquilla, a defense analyst at the Naval Postgraduate School, commenting on the record of Dan Haloutz's leadership of Tsahal in the July War.

I've been meaning to write on strategic bombing since before we left Portland two and a half years ago, I can't lay my hands on the pdf of a master's thesis, or credit its author, but what I took from it was that an instance of coercion of political elites of a belligerent state via "strategic bombing" of a that state's industrial infrastructure was difficult to document. A non-military work in this area is Robert Anthony Pape's Bombing to Win. Which leaves SAC with nothing but "strategic bombing" as directly, rather than indirectly, effective in determining outcomes between belligerent states, nuclear packages and the Air Force with nothing but that, tactical bombing, and new missions as the packaging for its claims on the defense budget.

Last month Cheryl Rofer of WhirledView proposed a blogger discussion the policy choices concerning the existing inventories of nuclear weapons -- see The Bloggers Develop Nuclear Weapons Policy. I'm late for the party.

First, the point made by John Kerry in 2004 remains -- the greatest threat to the United States (as well as Japan, China, India, Pakistan, Isreal, Europe, Canada, and the Russian Federation) is the risk that the existing stockpiles of devices and fissile materials will eventually be re-purposed, and the better policy is to allocate resources nominally reducing that risk model, up to and including unilateral partial disarmament. The alternative "single weapon" risk model was articulated in the same debate by George W. Bush, and independently by Peter Daou's sometime employers, Mssrs. Ted Turner, Sam Nunn, Warren Buffett and others, and without loss of generality, by the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator proponents.

Restated, the greatest quantifiable risk has no agency, and cannot be "deterred" or engaged in human discourse. It is rust. Sensor failure. False alarm. The next greatest quantifiable risk has agency, but also cannot be "deterred" or engaged in political discourse. It is covert or overt expropriation of devices or fissiles. Restated, it is sensor and inventory control failure.

This isn't a blogger discovery, its the policy of the Federation of American Scientists, and others, for quite some time.

in all the games I've ever been aware of, the introduction of a package within the bounds of the game substantially alters the game. These are games held at the NPGS, CAC, and I suppose elsewhere, and Air Land presumed that the introduction of weapons packages in theater would generalize without bound, and therefore Air/Land had to be solved, by Red and Blue player alike, without recourse to "tactical" nuclear weapons. So, despite the fact that there are some 3k packages in the Red Player kit, and more than half that number in the Blue Player kit, with delivery capability measured in the hundreds of kilometers, there are no scenarios in which use of a package determines any outcome other than the use of more packages, until all available packages have been used, targeting data is exhausted, or command and control capabilities are terminated (end game).

So, there are a lot of tactical nuclear weapons, in more than two national inventories, the battlefield utility of nuclear packages is without proof.

Restated, the "tactical" vs "strategic" distinction, even in the US / RF context, is merely one of range of delivery system, and locus of command and control. After use, no distinction exists. All packages are "strategic", even where the delivery system has a design range of zero meters. So unlike some of the bloggers contributing to Cheryl Rofer's discussion, I think there are tactical weapons, between 30% and 40% of the US and USSR/RF weapons inventories, none of which have military justification, and it is an area where the existing treaties, the political agreements of weapons states on weapons policy, in particular the bi-lateral treaties between the US and the USSR/RF, do not match military utility.

Later I'll try again, but I'll close for now with a note from my BRAC series:

NB that the current BRAC round does not define "military necessity or utility" in a nuclear weapons capacity context, and that the bases identified by the current SecDef (and war criminal) for closure or re-alignment map much more closely to the Red/Blue political division of the United States than to obsoleted nuclear weapons capacities -- the bombers, missile fields and boomers are budgetary untouchables.

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That's the title of a scholarly work by John Turner that appeared in Issue #4, Volume 20, of the film studies jounal Wide Angle in October 1998. The subject of the paper was ... Enemy of the State. There are lots of pictures on the web of Gene Hackman and Will Smith, but the ones I want are of the NSA officers, in particular the characters Fiedler and Shelby, from technical survellience. These.

Others are treating the FICA issue in a constitutional law context. I hope to throw some sunlight on a subordinate legal context, the Law of Information Operations. I'm hardly an expert, so I'm reading and commenting extra-textually, on Mark Shulman's paper, "Legal Constraints on Information Warfare". It is the least objectionable IO and Consequences paper I've come across. I've been aided in my research by the duty librarians at the Naval PostGraduate School, and Maxwell Air Force Base.

In footnotes to a quote from Clausewitz's Über die Natur des Krieges (the Graham translation), Shulman mistakes the sense of Cicero's Pro T. Annio Milone Oratio. The correct sense of Silent enim leges inter arma is not that there are no laws in war, rather that there are laws, which happen to be unwritten, which allowed armed men to co-exist without recourse to arms, except in self-defense, in civil society, For commentary on the rendering of Clausewitz into the Englishes (Victorian, Cold-War, etc.), I recommend the Clausewitz Project.

Shulman offers this repetoire of modalities of offensive information warfare, now referred to in the literature as "information operations":

1. active gathering intelligence about information systems (compare, passive)
   
2. unauthorized intrusions into information systems
   
3. introduction of vulnerabilities into information systems
   
4. corruption or denial of data
   
5. disabling or destroying informations systmes
   

United States law requires that the armed forces and intelligence services of the United States undertake this type of operations only against particular foreign opponents under executive order, presumably as part of a coordinated national policy to implment unilateral or multilateral defensive operations

That's all fine and dandy, but the drafter of that text didn't anticipate that the type of operation would target particular domestic opponents under executive order, in what can only be described as domestic political survellience within a larger 4GW context. [After three readings I don't see any way to work Shulman's paper so that it is sensible technically (too full of wizbang hypos, no operational art grounding), and too limited to classical "destructive" (non-IO) scenarios, not really ops as we know them. So I'm not finishing a post I thought I began. Interestingly enough along the way I discovered a gem, Blog Them Out of the Stone Age, when looking up the Lieber text.

We don't yet know the mechanism(s) employed, or the scope of each, what we do know is that orders which were illegal on their face were followed by military officers and civilian employees of the National Security Agency, and that following illegal orders has consequences.

There was never any question about Krug and Jones, if they survived the op, if they survived their arrest, they were going spend the rest of their pre-retirement years in Leavenworth. They knew the score.

"Technological developments in the methods of conducting war have increased the extent to which the written law is inadequate or absent."¹

Now there's a load of crap. Fiedler and Shelby are going to jail too. You bet your bippie the NSA officers and civilians who are carrying out this illegal IO are going to be facing Boards as soon as a Democrat appoints a SecDef, and its going to be all downhill from there. How long anyone has to come to their senses and go public and spend the next three or fewer years in the brig, rather than most of the next five administrations, is probably a matter of weeks. It will be Fitzmass with scrambled eggs and braid.

¹Adam Roberts and Richard Guelff (eds), Documents on the Laws of War, 3rd ed., Oxford University Press, 2000, 765 pages

Posted by EBW at 07:07 PM | Permalink

I've managed to win the battle of the remote, replacing the Teletubbies (gazillionth rerun) with Dances with Voles (also in high-ordinal repeats). I'm amazed how stilted Grahame Greene's Lakota is. He passes as a LDN¹ speaker only because ... non-Indians can't hear very well.

The NPS has two, and possibly a third paper out on their Katerina effort, which I'm reading. Like us, they fielded gear and people, and unlike us, being .mil, had easy pass-through the Haliburton-only barrier that FEMA threw up around the NOLA and Gulf Coast areas, and they had limitless funding.

A Fly-Away-Kit (FLAK) to support Hastily Formed Networks (HFN) for Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HA/DR).

Got to love those acronyms. How often does googleing for "flak" get you a reference to a semi-rugged laptop with a latté-proof keyboard? That's what this Parent of (two) Autistics wants.

The Air University could have used the Apache 2 rewrite rule to prevent the restructuring of their web site from breaking all links in the dot-mil-o-gone, but eventually "Happy Hunting" was mine.

It is ironic that the week-long all-services (NSA included) JAG course on Law of Information Operations ("Operations" is a generalization of the prior "Warfare", allowing for ... operations that aren't legally acts of war) isn't being taught in 2006. I expect I'll eventually find the syllabus and the teacher(s). The papers are of variable quality. The complete junk pile is the same height as the re-read once pile, and there is nothing in the must-read pile. This generation of RMA drunks is just as tipsy as the Reagan-epoch nutcases that identified with the "social conservatives" in Roberto D'Aubusson's El Salvador and the original RMA cohort who thought they could tech-and-target their way out of every nuclear weapons state conflict end-game.

Greene's lakota sounds like he's speaking through a picket fence. He can't runphonemestogetherbecause (gasp!) hischaracterisaholypersonand (gasp!) movieholypersonscannotspeaklakota.

¹L/D/N is how Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota Siouian languages are grouped and referred to as a language group. The geographic distribution is west-to-east.

Posted by EBW at 08:32 PM | Permalink

I just sent the research librarian at the Dudley Knox Library (where I spent many a happy afternoon) pseudo-mail (webform to refdesk at nps navy mil and gmarlatt nps navy mil) a note that all the URLs in Greta Marlatt's 06/00 IO bibliography generate 404s. It is unlikely that these are all now classified. Information Warfare & Information Operations (IW/IO). A Bibliography, Documents, Theses & Technical Reports.

This is a snap-shot of where IO was five year ago. People who want to flesh out a modern IO reading list please google and mail (or comment) your URLs. I'll scan and make my suggestions, and I look forward to those from others. Note Well: There is a lot of RMA/Wonder-Cruft attached to the literature, a lot of it is blatent fund-me stuff.

Oddly enough, my day job is in IO. The better kind I'm pleased to say.

Update: The Maxwell AFB (Air University) site PoC wrote to tell me that they'd reorg'd the site and offered me some nav-clue and a wish for "Happy Hunting" (which actually means something in the context of IO, in contradistinction to "Happy Gathering").

However, I don't think there is a soul on earth who cares about mechanism, though policy is rather fashionable at the moment, so I'll end this here.

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A message in a google... by the Police. It's a catchy tune.

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Throughout my pre-teen and teen years, where Calle de los Helechos ended in forest, and Monterey, Bill Mandel's show on KPFA was a must-listen. Bill knew the Union inside and out, and that was worth the time to listen in on. All the intracacies of the Show Trials, the Purges, and also the Five Year Plans and the military affairs -- the NATO facing Soviet ORBAT, the Fleets surface and subsurface combatants, and the Strategic Missile Forces throw-weights and device yeilds. Seperating the real from the surreal was ... not optional. Not everyone lived inside the Navy School however, and eventually, pursuit of the youth-demographic by Pacifica pushed Bill, and a lot of good listening time -- the stuff that's become blogs -- off of Pacifica, to be replaced by ... easier listening.

Res Publica's piece �and �trendy� �buzzwords� in �quotes�! mid-October left me tipsy from giggles, but the past comes back to bite. Read it. Then come back. Please.

John Hannah has just moved up from principal deputy assistant, to assistant to the Vice President for national security affairs. He used to ride tandem with Capt. William J. Luti, Ret., now Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Special Plans and Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs. Luti in turn came into the real world via Albert Wohlstetter, then mentor to Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard N. Perle, among others.

It is a rediculously small world. And in the Navy, making Captain is the big jump, as the manpower cut is at Commander. Having made Captain, why didn't Luti make Flag?

Albert Wohlstetter was at Rand when my mom was at Rand. He even flirted with one area I thought the Soviet schools were well ahead of the American - mathematical modelling techniques in military planning. My sample set was my Mom's students, who on average were given a "mercy pass" in Operations Research and then sent back, slightly improved and mostly unharmed, to the Fleet. She gave me their thesii to read and critique. That was 1965 - 1972. The NPGS had a wonderful library. (So does Ft. Leavenworth.) My card ran through the late '80s, when I switched to Le Monde Diplo's occasional coverage of doctrine, and whatever else I could get my hands on.

Aside. Google for +mathematical-modeling +military-planning still gets the ORD at the NPGS. Nothing changes.

Wohlstetter co-chared with Fred Ikl� the Commission on on Integrated Long-Term Strategy. That lead to the Future Security Environment (FSE) working group, which lead to the Office of Net Assessment within the Office of the Secretary of Defense and its 1989 reassessment of the military-technical revolution, the MTR, and that lead to the big bang, or at least, the pseudo-intellectual defense everyone from Ollie North to Donald Rumsfeld find comfortable.

Wohlstetter mined the Soviet mil-lit for the shape of things to come -- the military-technical revolution, the MTR, now the Revolution in Military Affairs. Really he was cribbing from the works of N.V. Ogarkov, Directorate for Strategic Deception, and later chief of the Soviet General Staff. It is all there in Vsegda v Gotovnosti k Zachtchite Otetchestva, Voenizdat, 1982, which has been translated into French, as well as plagerized into American, and earlier papers that made it into various Red Army pubs, that were translated. Pre-google. Mom and I could never agree on whether Ogarkov ment revolution tending towards special ops, the North/Rumsfeld vision, or revolution at the theater-and-above level. Now we talk about Chinese medicine and family tribal histories.

Chernenko fired Marshal Ogarkov, an advocate of less spending on consumer goods and more spending on weapons research and development. Guns over butter was not something the Union could afford in Chernenko's year, nor did it need to.

From Ogarkov to Wohlstetter to Luti to Hannah. Promoted today. These aren't rhetorical NeoCons. These are targeteers. These are believers in part (but not all) of the RMA, and it is important to remember that Chernenko fired his for ... failing to put butter ahead of guns, and being too fond of mobility and swiftness.

It is also important to remember what Lenoid Brezhnev said at the XXVI Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR in 1982, that the equilibrium between the USSR and the US, between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, objectively served to maintain peace on the planet.

It is just as important to remember what George Bush said in September, 1999

�This opportunity is created by a revolution in the technology of war. Power is increasingly defined, not by mass or size, but by mobility and swiftness. Influence is measured in information, safety is gained in stealth, and force is projected on the long arc of precision-guided weapons. . . . The best way to keep the peace is to redefine war on our terms.�

The Wars in Afganistan, and Iraq, and Syria or Iran or both, and the yellow cake boogie men simply wouldn't be the same if Bush had to pick up the red courtesy phone. Because it is ringing. And there is no equilibrium.

Note to self: +Voenizdat +Ogarkov fr/ru/en

Posted by EBW at 09:49 PM | Permalink

There are times I wish I were back at Fort Leavenworth, or the NPGS in Monterey, with access to a decent military library. Tonight is one of them, not because it is my wife's 40th birthday, or because I said "sure honey, I'll keep the baby tonight", but because there is such a thing as military scholarship.

Andrew Krepinevich has this gem:

... the insurgency, being primarily urban, has a "lower probability of success" than rural campaigns, as in China, Vietnam and Laos. ...

Lenin had to use a forklift to move "probability of success" from Engles' industrial Germany to Russia. Mao had to use a forklift to move "probability of success" from the cities to the countryside. From Pol Pot to Samir Amin, the forklift of theory has attempted to move "probability of success" from its last inevitable success to the improbable next. Operationally, the problem is much easier. Eradication of criminal organizations in metro and extended LA is objectively easier than in Inyo and Kern Counties, because metro LA is urban and therefore can not support sustained opposition formations, and Inyo-Kern is rural and therefore can support sustained opposition formations.

If you believe the para above, AK is your guiding light. Oh, and another thing, we rural Indians won the war and defeated the urban Europeans, in an unbroken string of victories starting at the Greasy Grass II (aka "Little Big Horn redux") and running through St. Louis, Vicksburg, and Chicago -- the Mississipian Campaign -- to the final battles in New York and Northern Virginia. Its in all the papers, even the Pink Pages of the FT.

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