You could simply refuse to be terrorized.  Send this to your elected officials:

I am not afraid of terrorism, and I want you to stop being afraid on my behalf. Please start scaling back the official government war on terror. Please replace it with a smaller, more focused anti-terrorist police effort in keeping with the rule of law. Please stop overreacting. I understand that it will not be possible to stop all terrorist acts. I accept that. I am not afraid.

Thanks to cybersecurity guru Bruce Schneier, who posted it on his blog today.

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By William S. Lind

From: Major Wormwood, III Section (Current Ops)
To: General Screwtape, Chief-of-Staff, Supreme Infernal Headquarters, Chateau de Malpense
Re: End of year net assessment

Sir:

Your Lucifership asked for a short report on the state of the world before the week of December 25, when all Hell is too weak to work. Please forgive my non-use of our wonderful invention, PowerPoint, but we are short of majors to make up the slides.

I am happy to be able to report that our net assessment is favorable. Fourth Generation war, and the disorder it represents, continue to expand their reach. The formerly Christian West, crippled by two of our favorite tools, hubris and ideology, flails helplessly before it. II Section, Intelligence, shares our view that the 21^st century promises to be even bloodier than the 20^th.

We have suffered what we believe will prove a temporary setback in Iraq. Our Glorious Ally on the Eastern Front, Marshal Mohammed - war be upon him - screwed the goat, to use one of our troops’ expressions. Al Qaeda’s premature enforcement of Sharia led Iraqi Sunnis to rebel, even to the point of making tactical alliances with the Americans. As a result, the level of violence is down.

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By Chuck Spinney

[DNI Editor’s note: An increase of even a few degrees in world average temperature over the next several decades could drown populous coastal regions, reduce the world’s stock of arable land, and perhaps accelerate the rise and intensify the effects of pandemics. Any of these could increase the likelihood of armed conflict between states and could lead to the disintegration of marginal states. Solutions, however, based on an inadequate understanding of the world meteorological system could damage economies without solving the problem. So it is important that we think logically and act scientifically when formulating policies to deal with global warming.]

I have been an avid sailor for over 25 years and that experience tells me the climate has changed, seeming to become warmer and certainly more unstable, but I do not like being stampeded into conclusions by slick Pentagon style briefings like the maudlin exercise in self-referencing that got Al Gore his Nobel Prize.

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Two insiders of the “military reform movement” of the 1970s and ’80s have written what amounts to a tell-all: Who was in the movement, who supported it, and who claimed to support it but in the end betrayed it. The military reform movement, for those unfamiliar with the term, was a bi-partisan effort to try to get the Pentagon to buy weapon systems that worked, adopt doctrines that had proven to win, and create personnel and training programs to support the new doctrines, weapons, and tactics. All of these were opposed by the senior leadership of the Pentagon, with few exceptions, and after an initial wave of enthusiasm, by the key leaders of Congress.

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By Adam Elkus

The digitized specter of cyberwar is haunting the boardrooms, barracks, and law offices of America. China’s audacious September 2007 infiltration of secure Pentagon networks and government servers in several other nations has powerfully demonstrated that cyberwar’s moment has arrived. Cybersecurity analysts have estimated that 120 different nations are working to evolve cyberwar capabilities. Most of today’s current cyberwar operations involve hackers probing civilian and military networks for vulnerabilities and restricted information, operations that focus less on disruption than recon and surveillance.

Cyberwar is here

However, the July 2007 cyberblitz of Estonia–in which massive denial of service attacks took down government and citizen networks–proves that hacking can and will be used as a kinetic weapon. Although kinetic hacking attacks are a relatively new tool, their purpose is by no means complex or exotic. Hacking will be utilized as one element of an established political or military strategy, rather than an end in itself. The goal is not the narrow disruption of a few computer systems but psychological in nature-to disrupt an enemy’s moral cohesion and cast him into confusion and chaos. This has been the goal of military forces since the days of Sun Tzu. We should not be surprised to see cyberwar fit inside such a paradigm.

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Comments are encouraged that follow a few (and I would have thought self-evident) guidelines:

1. Civil (as in “a civil tongue”)

2. Legal (avoid libel, copyright, and classification issues)

3. Topical (we are not all things to all people - this blog is for the list of categories on the right menu bar)

4. Brief (150 - 200 words. longer articles. Once accepted, they can be posted as blog entries or converted to PDFs, uploaded, and announced in the blog.)

By William S. Lind

Fourth Generation Seminar

(Note: This On War column is a product of the Fourth Generation War seminar, whose earlier products include the fourth generation war manual FMFM-1A [237 KB PDF]. The seminar, which I lead, is currently composed of U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. Army officers, mostly captains. W.S. Lind)

Recent tactical successes in Iraq, especially the reduction in violence in Anbar province and in Baghdad, have led some people to assume that we are now “winning the war.” However, for any tactical successes to add up to a win, they must be operationalized. That is, through operational art, they must be positively related to strategic success. While reducing the level of violence is no doubt necessary for strategic success in Iraq, it does not automatically lead to that goal.

If our enemies in Iraq (and elsewhere) are non-state, Fourth Generation forces, then strategic success is best defined as their opposite, i.e., seeing the re-emergence of a state in Iraq. While Iraq currently has a government, it remains largely stateless. Restoring a real state in Iraq requires not just a government but a government that is generally accepted as legitimate. No government created or installed by a foreign, occupying power is likely to achieve legitimacy.

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Retired US Army COL Doug Macgregor has just published a critical look at this issue.

While the arrangement reached by U.S. military commanders and dubbed the “Great Awakening” has allowed the administration and its allies to declare the surge a success, it carries long-term consequences that are worrisome, if not perilous. The reduction in U.S. casualties is good news. But transforming thousands of anti-American Sunni insurgents into U.S.-funded Sunni militias is not without cost. In fact, the much-touted progress in Iraq could lead to a situation in which American foreign-policy interests are profoundly harmed and the Middle East is plunged into even a larger crisis than currently exists.

I’m at a total loss to explain why this brilliant piece didn’t run in the New York Times or one of the other national mainstream publications.

Doug Macgregor, for those of you that don’t know him, is a highly decorated officer, veteran of the Battle of 73 Easting, and author of two influential studies on the future of the Army:  Breaking the Phalanx and Transformation Under Fire.

Americans are only beginning to realize what they’re up against, Inbal Nachum of the [Israeli] Home Front Command says forebodingly. “Americans don’t understand — you don’t understand — what it is like… [when terrorism] just is … just is the reality.

“They say the difference is that in America talk is about preventing terrorism; here in Sderot talk is about how to maintain sanity and group strength in the face of it. …

When — or perhaps if — terrorism strikes American soil again, America should do more than retaliate, they should also build up a community capable of bouncing back time and again.

Americans don’t ‘get’ terrorism,
by Amar C. Bakshi, washingtonpost.com,
7 December 2007.

The Critical Incident Management Institute at Greenville (SC) Tech has announced a series of courses and classes by noted disaster preparedness guru Dale Stewart.

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