Tactical Ground Reporting System (TIGR)

A recent article in MIT's online "Technology Review" describes a new location-based service called the Tactical Ground Reporting System (TIGR) (free subscription required). It marks a significant enhancement in counter-insurgency operations in Iraq and directly incorporates the experiences (combat, IED events, civilian interviews/reports) of soldiers in the field (e.g. patrolling) which may be accessed by clicking on icons positioned where the event occurred.

The following extracts from the article provide some insight into TIGR and its operational relevance:

The new technology--called the Tactical Ground Reporting System, or TIGR--is a map-centric application that junior officers (the young sergeants and lieutenants who command patrols) can study before going on patrol and add to upon returning. By clicking on icons and lists, they can see the locations of key buildings, like mosques, schools, and hospitals, and retrieve information such as location data on past attacks, geotagged photos of houses and other buildings (taken with cameras equipped with Global Positioning System technology), and photos of suspected insurgents and neighborhood leaders. They can even listen to civilian interviews and watch videos of past maneuvers. It is just the kind of information that soldiers need to learn about Iraq and its perils.

A prototype of the system was shown to soldiers for the first time during a training exercise at Fort Hood in April 2006, and in January 2007, it was introduced in Iraq. There, programmers observed how the troops used it; they collected feedback and quickly made changes. Finally--with help from the Rapid Equipping Force, an army unit devoted to quickly moving new gear into the field--the system reached the 1,500 patrol leaders using it now.

Michaelis says such anecdotes are not uncommon. "I can't name the number of times that patrol leaders and company commanders have turned to me and stated [that] their most important tool they have to fight this fight has been TIGR," he wrote. "I've had ... time-sensitive operations that were able to make associations between the target being handed to them and local residents, [allowing the soldiers to find insurgents who otherwise would have escaped]. I've had patrol leaders avoid potential IED hot spots or pass on IED tactics to their fellow patrol leaders."

And the technology is poised to expand. For now, it is accessible only at military bases. The next step, says Maeda, is to install it in Humvees and other military vehicles, allowing soldiers to download and act on new information in real time. Some of these vehicles already have some low-bandwidth connections, and Maeda says DARPA is working on ways to make the software work using these thin pipes. In addition, the system may soon deliver new kinds of information. In the next two to three years, it could offer surveillance pictures from circling unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or other sensor systems. It could store biometric information, so that a soldier could see if a civilian being interviewed was a known insurgent suspect. "There is a whole list of enhancements that users have requested that we want to fill," Maeda says.

Atomic Magnetometers vs IEDs

As noted in my PowerPoint web presentation, Networking Brains and Bullets in the Canadian Forces (Slide 31) micro-sized computers serving as networked sensors may provide the breakthrough needed in counter-IED efforts. An article in the online version of MIT's "Technology Review" discusses how the emergent technology of Atomic Magnetometers may be a major step forward in reaching this goal.

An extract from the article summarizes this view:

... the low-power sensors could be set into portable, battery-power­ed imaging arrays. Such arrays could easily map out the strength and extent of magnetic fields; the more sensors in an array, the more information it can provide about an object's location and shape. Soldiers, for example, could use such arrays to find unexploded bombs and improvised explosive devices more quickly and cheaply.

Re-thinking Net-Centric Warfare

It seems that our view of net-centric war has been too narrow. A recent Wired Magazine article draws attention to how social net-working is being incorporated into the US Army’s psychological operations (psyops) in Iraq. The idea is to expand the concept of net-centric warfare beyond its strictly military emphasis to include the population as the following excerpts suggest:

Those men will leave eventually, though, and to sustain the gains they make, (the commander) is supposed to recruit civilians into a kind of neighborhood watch. The idea is to have as many eyes and ears on the streets, around the shops, and in the mosques as possible. In counterinsurgency, it's better to have a lot of nodes in your network, connecting to the population, than just a few. In fact, that's a key tenet of the new US strategy in Iraq — hiring watchmen who've come to be known in other towns as "alligators" for their light-blue Izod shirts. Prior hasn't had much luck in getting folks in Tarmiyah to sign up; even his own soldiers are reluctant to go out in the daytime.

Meanwhile, insurgent forces cherry-pick the best US tech: disposable email addresses, anonymous Internet accounts, the latest radios. They do everything online: recruiting, fundraising, trading bomb-building tips, spreading propaganda, even selling T-shirts. And every American-financed move to reinforce Iraq's civilian infrastructure only makes it easier for the insurgents to operate. Every new Internet café is a center for insurgent operations. Every new cell tower means a hundred new nodes on the insurgent network. And, of course, the insurgents know the language and understand the local culture. Which means they plug into Iraq's larger social web more easily than an American ever could. As John Abizaid, Franks' successor at Central Command, told a conference earlier this year, "This enemy is better networked than we are."

The Army has set aside $41 million to build what it calls Human Terrain Teams: 150 social scientists, software geeks, and experts on local culture, split up and embedded with 26 different military units in Iraq and Afghanistan over the next year. The first six HTTs are already on the ground. The idea, basically, is to give each commander a set of cultural counselors, the way he has soldiers giving him combat advice.

In western Afghanistan, for instance, a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division was being targeted by rockets, over and over, from the vicinity of a nearby village. But no one from the unit had bothered to ask the townspeople why. When the Human Terrain Team finally paid a visit, villagers complained that the Taliban was around only because the Americans didn't provide security. And oh, by the way, they really wanted a volleyball net, too. So a net was acquired. Patrols were started. There hasn't been an attack in two months.

General David Petraeus knows all about these mind games. The man in charge of the American military effort in Iraq helped turn soldiers' training from tank-on-tank battles to taking on insurgents. He oversaw the writing of the new counterinsurgency manual that John Nagl worked on. The book counsels officers to reinforce the local economy and politics and build knowledge of the native culture, "an operational code' that is valid for an entire group of people." And the manual blasts the old, network-centric American approach in Iraq. "If military forces remain in their compounds, they lose touch with the people, appear to be running scared, and cede the initiative to the insurgents," it says.

The fact is, today we rely on our troops to perform all sort of missions that are only loosely connected with traditional combat but are vital to maintaining world security. And it's all happening while the military is becoming less and less likely to exercise its traditional duties of fighting an old-fashioned war. When is that going to happen again? What potential enemy of the US is going to bother amassing, Saddam-style, army tanks and tens of thousands of troops when the insurgent approach obviously works so well? "The real problem with network-centric warfare is that it helps us only destroy. But in the 21st century, that's just a sliver of what we're trying to do," Nagl says. "It solves a problem I don't have — fighting some conventional enemy — and helps only a little with a problem I do have: how to build a society in the face of technology-enabled, super-empowered individuals."

One thing is clear: The Human Terrain Teams will eventually do more than just advise. Soon each team will get a server, a half-dozen laptops, a satellite dish, and software for social-network analysis — to diagram how all of the important players in an area are connected. Digital timelines will mark key cultural and political events. Mapmaking programs will plot out the economic, ethnic, and tribal landscape, just like the command post of the future maps the physical terrain. But those HTT diagrams can never be more than approximations, converting messy analog narratives to binary facts. Warfare will continue to center around networks. But some networks will be social, linking not computers and drones and Humvees but tribes, sects, political parties, even entire cultures. In the end, everything else is just data.

A Canadian perspective is presented in the article "Psychological operations: The battlefield’s human dimension".

Ubiquitous Computing Takes a Big Step Forward

Microsoft has developed a new highly interactive computer built into a physical desktop. The technology is called "surface computing". The video gives an impressive demonstration of its capability. It reminds me of Steve Jobs' introduction to Apple's new iPhone. Both incorporate touch technology which replaces the mouse. It is easy to imagine a military application with soldiers seated around the tabletop manipulating maps and related graphics while planning an operation.

Who, Exactly, is the Enemy?

If we are to re-envision the military, then we must consider, too, the characteristics of the enemy we may be required to combat.

It is called the "war on terror". But who, exactly, are the individuals against whom this war is being fought? "Terror" or "terrorism" is a tactic or technique which groups espousing a number of causes might employ to achieve their goals. The targets of terror seem to be individuals specially selected because of their influence, or any grouping of innocent individuals chosen to maximize mayhem. The ultimate objective is to instill fear in a population such that they, in turn, will bring pressure to bear on their government to accede to the terrorists' demands.

The group which has inspired the current war is that credited with planning and implementing the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade towers in New York. That group is al-Qaeda and its allies and sympathizers. And, in Afghanistan, that would include the Taliban who provided the training camps for al-Qaeda and sheltered them despite demands for their extradition.

But what motivates al-Qaeda? The specific trigger for 9/11 may have been the presence of US forces in Saudi Arabia which followed the ejection of Iraqi forces from Kuwait in the first Gulf War in 1991. But why should that be such a big deal? If you are a Muslim who subscribes to the view that Saudi Arabia, the site of the holy shrine of Mecca, is sacred ground, then the presence of infidels (i.e. US forces) is unacceptable. A government that would authorize such a presence would, itself, be deemed unIslamic and illegitimate.

This begs the question: What kind of Muslim would that be? This brings us to the matter of Islamic fundamentalism. It is Sayyid Qutb, a leading member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s and 60s, who is credited with having a major influence on Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda. {For more information on Qutb see "Qutbism: An Ideology of Islamic-Fascism", a pdf document.) This connection may have been through Sayyid's brother, Mohammad Qutb, who became a professor of Islamic Studies in Saudi Arabia. One of Muhammad's students was Ayman al-Zawahiri, now deemed a key mentor of Osama and a leading al-Qaeda strategist.

Reference to Islamic fundamentalism further begs the question: How might it differ from mainstream Islam? According to some sources the challenge to the West is Islam itself, as documented in the Koran and the Hadith. This is spelled out in detail in a full length video "Islam: What the West Needs to Know". An interview with Robert Spencer concerning this video may be viewed from this link.

In his books Qutb preached a fundamentalist view of Islam, such as:

• Islam is a complete system of laws, governance and economics. Western civilization is seen as the antithesis of such a system, with the US as its primary exemplar.

• Men are the managers of women.

• Muslims have a duty (jihad) to spread Islam throughout the world, including nominally Muslim countries which have adopted Western ideas of democracy and permit laws other than sharia, or simply do not practise a sufficiently pure version of Islam .

Such views underpin a desire to re-establish the Caliphate that dominated the Islamic world from the 8th to 12th centuries. Indeed, as explained by the reformed British Islamic radical, Hassan Butt, the ultimate goal is to bring Islamic justice (sharia) to the whole world. Another former radical in Britain, Shiraz Maher, writes:

One of the principal proponents of this view in Britain is Hizb ut-Tahrir, of which I was a member and regional officer for north-east England. It was through my membership of the group that I first met Bilal Abdulla and Kafeel Ahmed, the two men suspected of driving an explosive-laden jeep into Glasgow Airport.

During that year we became close friends, and met frequently to discuss politics. The atmosphere was always highly charged when we considered the decline of political Islam. We felt humiliated by it. We all believed in championing the supremacy of Islam, wanting to see a future Islamic empire dominate the world and, of course, to establish a puritanical Islamic state.

Source: http://www.newstatesman.com/200707120030

Col. Thomas Snodgrass (USAF Ret.) defines the enemy explicitly and simply as those who espouse and actively urge the adoption of sharia. A British politician has urged the banning of the above mentioned Hizb ut-Tahrir. It has recently been reported that Hizb ut-Tahrir has been gaining adherents in the West Bank. This may indicate that the political failure of Hamas will not foreshadow a return to secularism.

Wahhabism, a variant of the Sunni religion, espouses a literal interpretation of the hadith (sayings of the prophet Mohammad). While there are Saudi dissidents who oppose it, it is the dominant religion of Saudi Arabia and of the Saudi royal family. This would seem to provide an environment or mindset in which Qutb's ideas could flourish. The royal family financially supports mosques in the US (and Europe) whose imams urge Muslims not to associate with the American or European infidels. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudi citizens. What is surprising, however, is that Saudi Arabia is still a major ally of the US, and apparently actively hunts down radical Islamists in their midst. But, then, al-Qaeda (itself founded by Osama bin Laden, a Saudi citizen) does seek to overthrow the West-friendly governments of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan. All this serves to remind us of the widely varying views of what really constitutes Islam.

Qutb's writings may play a role in the present era similar to that of Marx's "Das Capital" and Hitler's "Mein Kampf" in the spread of Communism and Nazism respectively in the 20th Century. Communism was an explicitly atheistic philosophy (at least as practised in the USSR) while Nazism had a major element of religiosity in its opposition to Jews and in the tacit approval by Christian groups in Germany. In the current Islamic extremism, however, religion is the dominant force, indeed its sole raison d'être, while other religious views, political systems and economies are seen as the pagan rites of heathens (infidels). Another significant difference with the earlier two philosophies is that they were state-based (USSR and Germany) after their proponents gained political control, while, since the ousting of the Taliban government in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda is not state-based or supported. Iran, transformed by the Grand Ayatollah Khomeini after the overthrow of the Shah in 1979, may be sympathetic and some evidence indicates the active but secret involvement of the Revolutionary Guard in providing aid to Iraqi Shia insurgents, Within Pakistan there is substantial support within the population, particularly among the Pashtun tribe bordering Afghanistan. A particularly worrisome possibility is that Pakistan may be the next state to offer a haven to al-Qaeda and its like-minded Islamic extremists. The assault on the Red Mosque in Islamabad by the Pakistani Army on 10 July 2007 may lead to a major battle against the militant Islamists which may clarify the situation.

Because al-Qaeda has been deprived of a firm territorial space from which to plan and launch its attacks, it has resorted to cyberspace. The number of active radical Islamist websites has been estimated to have grown from under 100 in 1996 to over 5,000 today. This electronic network links Muslims world-wide, reinforcing the global consciousness of the "ummah" or Islamic nation, even among those who are citizens of Western countries. The resulting mindset among some Muslims in the UK, for example, has led them to label as "traitors" British Muslims who joined the British Army, and to threaten them with beheading, the Koranic punishment for "apostasy". However, it may still be the case that the most likely agents of bomb attacks are immigrant Muslims holding radical beliefs, such as those members of the UK medical service accused in the recent failed car bombings in central London and the Glasgow airport.

More insidious is "stealth jihad" which is explained in a recent article, "US Sleeps While Society, Values Get Undermined By Stealth Jihad", published in the online version of the "Evening Bulletin", a Philadelphia, PA, newspaper. It draws a distinction between "explosive jihad" and "stealth jihad". The latter term refers to efforts to have sharia law become embedded in the American legal system, by influencing the decisions of judges hearing cases which involve Muslims. The approach is well advanced in Europe, especially in the Netherlands and England. The views of the American based Revolution Muslim are summarized here.

That there is a latent threat from radicalized Muslims in Canada seems evident from a recent CBC documentary aired on The National entitled "Who Speaks for Islam?" which focused on two Muslim organizations with differing views, the Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC) and the Muslim Congress of Canada (MCC). While the MCC seems to be quite outspoken in its condemnation of Islamic extremists and their interpretation of Islamic theology (the Koran), the CIC appears to be reluctant to adopt such an unequivocal stance, but instead accuses the MCC of "Islam-bashing". Further, the CIC favours a role for Sharia law in Ontario in family matters involving Muslims, while the MCC opposes it. It gets worse, as MCC members have been attacked and beaten, and a former executive member, Tarek Fatah, felt it prudent to resign after receiving threats to his life. To date there is no report of the identification and arrest of those responsible. One is left to wonder whether the CIC condones such crimes and, if so, is it because they are consistent with its interpretation of Koranic scripture? While the CBC video is not currently available online, an article entitled "Islam's angry women" also exemplifies the lack of unity among Muslims on interpretations of Islam.

In spite of the above evidence of a significant threat from Islamic extremists, there is a growing demand that our forces be withdrawn from Afghanistan. What are some of the possible implications of such a move?

If NATO, including Canada, withdraws from Afghanistan before the Afghan government and its military and police forces can contain and eliminate the Taliban, we may be called upon again to intercede to prevent a social and humanitarian disaster. A general retreat by the West from the Middle East may encourage the extremists, provide them with solid bases in which to train and from which to launch attacks against the West. Such a development will also encourage those Muslims in the West who have been radicalized to expand their operations. Those Islamic zealots who aspire to the establishment of a new Caliphate extending from Morocco to the Philippines may rapidly move to fill the vacuum left by the retreating West.

Such a "domino effect" may only be realistic, however, if there is substantial support for the radical Islamic views of the extremists. It seems clear that a majority of Muslims do not support such views but, without strong support from their peers and the general non-Muslim population (in Western countries), are understandably reluctant to expose themselves to retribution. It has been argued that it is unrealistic to consider that the imposition of a new Caliphate is even reasonable, given the minority position of al-Qaeda in countries of the Middle East. It has been noted that the Taliban only came to power in Afghanistan after that country was exhausted by fighting the Soviet Union.

Furthermore, once our forces withdraw, extremists will no longer be able to claim that they are fighting a foreign occupying force, and hence support for their views may decline. Indeed, recent trends in the western Iraqi province of Anbar indicate a growing dissatisfaction with the actions of al-Qaeda in Iraq in employing suicide bombers, many of whom are not Iraqis, to inflict casualties among many innocent Iraqi civilians, often Sunni. The departure of NATO forces may result in a refocusing, not only among Iraqis, but in the Middle East generally, upon the destructive interpretation of the Koran championed by al-Qaeda. There are certainly elements in Iran who are agitating for greater freedom of expression in that modern country and, officially, that country has not been keen to align itself with al-Qaeda. That may be because, as one report notes, "Iran's Shiite Muslims are considered infidels by the Salafi (cf. Wahhabi) sect of Sunnis that comprise Al Qaeda (sic)".It should be borne in mind, however, that the Kenyan and Tanzanian bombings of US embassies, the USS Cole attack, the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia and, of course, the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon were not responses to an occupying force (except, as noted earlier, US Forces were present in Saudi Arabia after the Kuwait war). Indeed, they may have been inspired by a belief that the US lacked the courage and decisiveness to respond with devastating military force. (As an aside, it should be recalled that some argue that those who planned the twin towers attacks were explicitly hoping to draw the US into the Middle East to confront their forces directly, and to make it appear as a "war against Islam".) Even in the event of a planned withdrawal there should no longer be any doubt about the willingness of the US and its allies to act forcefully if threatened again, and armed, next time, by valuable lessons learned.

Note: This blog has not yet addressed issues raised by the massive immigration of Muslims into Europe and North America since the end of World War II. Such issues have been raised in books by Bat Ye'or, "Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis" and by Christopher Caldwell, "Reflections on the Revolution in Europe".


Contrary to the official view that the attack on the World Trade Center towers marked a turning point in the war against the West by Islamists (i.e. those espousing a radical (fundamental) interpretation of Islam), there has been a mass distribution among Muslims of a warning entitled "Warning of a Global War On Islam". The signatories are an American and a Canadian. The "warning" concludes by urging the following:

We were promised that the “war on terror” would be a very long one. Do you think this will all blow away? If so, you’re sadly mistaken. For example, 28 million copies of a DVD outlining Muslim plans for world conquest have been sent to American homes — often enclosed in newspapers and magazines. Rumors persist of large-scale detention facilities currently under construction by Haliburton Inc with a capacity of about three million persons. Given the nature of this war on Islam, you have no choice but be involved.

You have been warned by knowledgeable and sincere Muslim brothers. You really have no choice.

To be continued as time permits ...

NATO, WMD and Terrorism

I attended an interesting lecture today by E.C. Whiteside, Head, NATO Weapons of Mass Destruction Centre. His theme was NATO's role in combatting the proliferation of WMD, especially to terrorists. He stressed NATO's growing expertise in collective security especially in situations involving non-state aligned groups, such as Al-Qaeda. As evidence of the recognition of such expertise, he noted the recent visits to Brussels of the President of Pakistan and the Prime Minister of Japan. NATO also is playing a role in Iraq by providing mentoring and training of its security forces.

He reviewed the growth and decline in the numbers worldwide of nuclear weapons, but noted that as other nations acquire such weapons their numbers may again begin to rise. Facilitating such a development is the ease of access to technical information over the Internet and the enhanced opportunities for collaboration.

If the 20th century witnessed the triumph of physics in achieving the hydrogen bomb, then the 21st century may see a similar rise to dominance of biotechnology. A key feature of this new technology, which makes detection especially difficult, is the small-scale of the laboratories in which research and development can take place.

One aspect of WMD which was not addressed was the vulnerability of the target. During WWII targets acquired some measure of invulnerability by "hardening" (increasing the physical ability to withstand blast), being placed underground or inside mountains and by spatial dispersion and duplication, especially of factories producing war matériel. The problem with chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons (CBRN) of mass destruction is that, as essentially area weapons, the scale of spatial dispersion may be so vast, as to be totally impracticable. However, following the dictum of Herman Kahn, there may come a time when "thinking the unthinkable" may be simply the prudent thing to do! In any event advances in science and technology, motivated by the need to combat this new threat to our collective security, may enable countermeasures, such as laser and particle beam weapons, which may alter the whole context of WMD.

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!