Tipping Points and Mass Collaboration

The idea of a tipping point is captured in the common expression "The straw that broke the camel's back" and in the observation from chaos theory that movement of a butterfly's wings in China may precipitate a tornado in Kansas. In the context of Iraq and Afghanistan there may be several potential tipping points. These may be three of them:

• American/Canadian public opinion reaches such a level that governments are forced to implement a withdrawal of forces from Iraq/Afghanistan.
  
• Iraqi/Afghanistani public opinion becomes so fed up with continued insurgent attacks against civilians that they en masse actively support coalition forces with intelligence and enlistment in their national armed forces.
  
• Large scale deployment of UAVs enables continuous surveillance of the movements of insurgent forces, particularly in those areas of Baghdad and other key cities that coalition forces are committed to clear and hold, thus facilitating their encirclement, preventing their escape in the face of the advancing troops and resulting in a major change of direction of the war.
  

The last one particularly interests me in the light of President Bush's new tactics in Iraq. An infusion of 21,500 more troops is aimed at clearing and holding territory in which insurgents are active. The idea is not simply to expel the insurgents and withdraw, but to expel and stay (though probably with a reduced number of troops), and move on to the next objective. Obviously this new approach will require more troops. If a few UAVs over Fallujah can detect localized movement patterns of militants, then masses of UAVs may enable the tracing of movement patterns on a regional scale. The intelligence derived from a large number of UAVs will require sophisticated software for integration and analysis. It is in this context that the mass collaboration of knowledgeable scientists (especially geographers and other spatial analysts) and soldiers (and others) may play a role. A model that the military may find useful to emulate is InnoCentive. InnoCentive® is an exciting web-based community matching seekers with problems to solvers with solutions. Of course, in the context of ongoing warfare there are key issues of timeliness and security. However it is accomplished there is a need to level the playing field. Our forces operate pretty much in a fish bowl while our opponents are virtually indistinguishable from the civilian population, and choose their targets with impunity. Infiltration of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) by the British was probably a key factor leading to the IRA's acceptance of a ceasefire and the destruction of its weapons. It is extremely difficult, for cultural reasons (though not impossible), to infiltrate the insurgent network and thus our best bet may be to observe behaviour, in full awareness that such behaviour may be intended to mislead us!