How to be an InformationWar Activist - Part Thirteen: An Understanding of Decapitation Strategy and it's Uses Beyond Assassination

stevescoins (69)in #informationwar • 7 years ago (edited)

I used to think that the causes of war were predominantly economic. I came to think that they were more psychological. I am now coming to think that they are decisively "personal," arising from the defects and ambitions of those who have the power to influence the currents of nations.
B.H. Liddell Hart
(Quote retrieved from Hyder's work)

What is Decapitation Strategy?

Decap, as I will call the strategy from here on out to save my tired little fingers, is a method of targeting leaders in an organization to disrupt the operation of the organization. It usually refers to the assassination or capture of leaders of terrorists or criminal organizations. It also goes beyond targeting just leaders and involves the identification and hindrance of financiers, organizers, propagandists, and anyone else who gets things done for the targeted organization.

Does it work?

Johnston (2009,2010) points out that there is some academic resistance to the idea the decap works, but argues that the strategy works in more ways than academics look at...

campaigns are more likely to end quickly when counterinsurgents successfully target enemy leaders.
counterinsurgents who successfully capture or kill insurgent leaders are significantly more likely to defeat insurgencies than those who fail.
conflict intensity is more likely to decrease following successful leadership removals than after failed attempts

In addition, Price and Hashim both stress that

targeting the group’s leadership reduces its operational capability by eliminating its most highly skilled members and forcing the group to divert valuable time and limited resources to protect its leaders.
(Price)

Johnston also states that

schlolars have implicitly rejected the largely untested hypothesis that insurgent leaders can have a significant influence on key outcomes

So we can note that academic resistance is narrowly focused and not fully tested.

In my own discussion with a Special Operations officer who had served in Afghanistan and Iraq using these techniques, he did not feel that they were effective in anything other than creating chaos...however, if our intent is to disrupt corruptocrat networks, chaos is a price to pay, and it is certainly against corruptocrat interests!

Staeheli notes two things regarding decap:

This thesis finds that killing versus incarcerating a terrorist leader seems to make little difference. Instead, insurgent organizations are most likely to collapse when they fail to name a successor, regardless of whether the leader is killed or captured.

Killing or capturing an insurgent leader provides a means of eliminating the knowledge, charismatic power, and direction that the leader instills within the organization

Clemens

However, the efficacy of decapitation has less to do with whether it is uniformly implemented as a counter-terrorism
mechanism and more to do with the conditions, timing, structure, and aims of the extremist group in question.

Hyder weighs in on the effciency of the strategy, and not moral aspects:

The recent US targeting of Saddam Hussein, Mullah Mohammed Omar, and Osama bin Laden have spawned a multitude of articles and books discussing this mission’s moral and legal aspects. Very few discuss whether or not it is the most advantageous course of action.

Hyder goes on to discuss decap as the U.S. government uses it, and asks very relevant questions about using it efficiently, questions that can be translated into Information War terms

What is a strategic individual?
What types of political or military frameworks are susceptible to decapitation?
How does United States military doctrine address decapitation operations?
What decapitation operations has the United States conducted in the past?
What was the result of these past operations?
What criteria must be met for a campaign to benefit from targeting enemy leadership

Corruptocracies as Insurgencies

I see no problem in defining corruptocracires or subversive movements as insurgencies. They operate outside the recognized boundaries of law, even when they control those laws. One example would be James Comey "clearing" Hillary Clinton of a crime the entire country knew she violated.

De Leon notes that the cartels established their own shadow government, and suggested that the critics of the Mexican Drug War critics fail to take into account the extent to which Mexican institutions suffered from severe corruption when Calderón took office and began the war.

Price states:

In clandestine terrorist groups, leaders are insulated from most of the external pressures that constrain these other leaders. Unless the group is state sponsored, terrorist leaders do not answer to a superior or a board of directors. They are not as worried about perceptions of legitimacy or morality from those other than the populations from which they recruit or are trying to influence.

Sounds like the Deep State to me!

Not Just Assassination

In no way am I going to suggest that assassination operations be undertaken against corruptocrats and subversives. It is illegal to do so.

However, the principles of targeting those operatives of corruption with efficiency can apply to legal methods. Information War is the use of controlled information to achieve strategic goals. Targets can be identified and subjected to public disclosure of their crime, of their lies, and of betraysls of their families. If a corruptocrat is cheating on his wife, his wife should know that, don't you think? If he uses prostitutes, his children should know that.

I'm sure that bright minds can uncover other tactics.

Will it work?

Jones and Olken (2009), in their study of the assassination of national leaders, use a similar identification strategy to that used here, and find that changes in national leadership can increase the probability of war termination in high-intensity wars

Fearon and Laitin chime in

change in government or rebel leadership can influence war termination...Change in leadership can of course be endogenous to the war–indeed, changing the leadership of the other side is generally the point of the war!

I'll bring up Butler in a second, but realize that "national leadership" may not be the ideal target...

Clemens introduces to the idea of efficiency in decap

This suggests that policy-makers and scholarship would benefit from a less binary view on the usage of decapitation and its effectiveness. Rather, like all strategic options, targeted killings or arrests of militant leadership should be weighed against other appropriate stratagem and only implemented under the favorable conditions in order to maximize the potential outcome

Which brings us to Butler, who discusses some specifics ( and we should keep in mind Hyder's question earlier)

How Decentralization Increases Group Resilience (I argue that corruptocracies are centralized by necessity)
How Bureaucratization Increases Group Resilience (Butler's point seems weird here, but he is referring to specialization)
The "national" leaders may not be the best targets

First, the United States’ strategy overestimates the effects of lethal targeting by focusing on symbolically important top-tier leaders

Instead...

This approach overlooks the importance of operational level leadership.

these would be the type of targets I discuss in my introduction to decap

EMPHASIZING CAPTURE OVER KILL
I think we may be too worried over arrests of malfeasant targets, especially considering the failure of LE to do their job
INTEGRATING LEADERSHIP TARGETING WITH A BROADER MILITARY STRATEGY
In our case, integration with liberty centered InformationWar

Moving past Butler, Price notes another benefit in regards to decap and corruptocrats

Replacing terrorist group leaders is more difficult than replacing leaders in other organizations

In previous discussions regarding the Deep State and kakistocracy/corruptocracy in general, the possibility that these organizations seek out sociopaths to recruit; that has to be a hard process, having to balance out exposure and the possible need to silence "failed" recruits

Jordan, although finding decap to be less effective than other researchers, does states that

Decapitation is more effective against ideological organizations than religious organizations
ideological organizations are more hierarchical. The literature on social network analysis argues that decentralized
organizations are less likely to suffer setbacks than hierarchically structured organizations.

Again, since I have considered the American problem to be a combination of leftism and globalism, Jordan's point comes into some effect here.

Conclusion

Here is the thing about the Mexican Government’s strategic options at the start of the Drug
War: they had this very shitty option, they had an even shittier option, and then they had the
shittiest of options. So, they went with the shitty option. In the end, it’s all shit.
Minister Rodrigo Canales, Political Advisor to the Mexican Ambassador to the United States
(De Leon)

De Leon starts her thesis by describing her flight from her hometown, Tampico, due to cartel violence. Due to decap, she was able to return to a more peaceable city.

IT IS POSSIBLE TO WIN

But it takes more effort on the part of the community. Hanna et al, in their review of corruption studies, states:

Community-level monitoring can be successful, but only when the community can punish corruption

Here is one option that allows a community to punish those that betray it...

References And Suggested Reading

Butler, B. M. (2015). Precipitating the decline of Al-Shabaab: a case study in leadership decapitation. Monterey, California: Naval Postgraduate School. Retrieved from http://calhoun.nps.edu/handle/10945/47912

Clemens, T. (2016). Headhunting: Evaluating the Disruptive Capacity of Leadership Decapitation on Terrorist Organizations. City University of New York.

De Leon, D. (2016). When Heads Roll: Assessing the Effectiveness of the Mexican Military’s Decapitation Strategy Throughout the Course of the Drug War. Retrieved from http://repository.wellesley.edu/thesiscollection/326/

Fearon, J. and Laitin, D., (September 2008). “Civil War Termination,” Mimeo, Stanford University

Hanna, R., Bishop, S., Nadel, S., Scheffler, G., & Durlacher, K. (2011). The effectiveness of anti-corruption policy. EPPI Centre Report, (1909). Retrieved from https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/59d0/d539964a5ef49d2bb0f545f3cbbcf222b2e4.pdf

Hashim, A. S. (2013). US decapitation raids: targeting terrorist leaderships. Retrieved from https://dr.ntu.edu.sg/handle/10220/20163

Hyder, V. D. (2004). Decapitation operations: Criteria for targeting enemy leadership. DTIC Document. Retrieved from http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA429271

Johnston, P. (2009). The effectiveness of leadership decapitation in counterinsurgency. Doctoral, Center for International Security and Cooperation Stanford University. Retrieved from http://fsi-media.stanford.edu/evnts/5724/Johnston_-Decapitation(CISAC).pdf

Johnston, P. (2010). Assessing the Effectiveness of Leadership Decapitation in Counterinsurgency Campaigns. International Security, 36. Retrieved from http://scholar.harvard.edu/johnston/files/decapitation.pdf

Jones, B. and Olken, B. “Hit or Miss? The Effect of Assassinations on Institutions and War,” Macroeconomics, July 2009, 1(2), 55–87

Jordan, J. (2009). When Heads Roll: Assessing the Effectiveness of Leadership Decapitation. Security Studies, 18(4), 719–755. https://doi.org/10.1080/09636410903369068

Price, B. C. (2012). Targeting Top Terrorists. International Security, 36(4), 9–46.

Staeheli, P. W. (2010, March). Collapsing insurgent organizations through leadership decapitation : a comparison of targeted killing and targeted incarceration in insurgent organizations (Thesis). Monterey, California. Naval Postgraduate School. Retrieved from https://calhoun.nps.edu/handle/10945/5419

The tag

The tag #informationwar, and posts that would be classified under that tag include methods of Information War, Propaganda, and Disinformation. The discussion would include governmental doctrine, historical application, Information War on the spectrum of warfare modes, recognition of fakenews, public OSINT, the concept of a Deep State and reaction to it, and critical thinking in analyzing these concepts.

By necessity, conspiracy theory can be discussed under this tag as they often address what many view as Deep State disinformation; this means that discussion of PizzaGate could fall under this discussion. However, I don't want to make this type of discussion the focus of the tag, but rather discussing these issues in terms of method

The ultimate purpose of my focus on InformationWar is to provide you with the tools to defend liberty within this mode of war.

This series index:

Steemit writers contributing to understanding Information War

@dragon40 - Civil War Diary
@lifeworship
@phibetaiota - Information War, OSINT
@fortified
@krnel - Critical Thinking/Cognitive Bias
@richq11 - Political Science
@dwinblood - Critical Thinking
@rebelskum - http://pizzagate.wiki, Din's Fire
@ausbitbank
@titusfrost
@canadian-coconut
@cupidzero - Subversion of the educational system
@ozmaga - counter-propaganda
@odinthelibrarian - OSINT, infosec
@newsagg
@goldgoatsnguns - Russia, finace, geopolitics
@truthforce

Study Resources

Some Resources for Studying Propaganda
Index of Critical Thinking and Fighting the Information War
Journal of Information Warfare
INFORMATION WARFARE AND INFORMATION OPERATIONS (IW/IO): A BIBLIOGRAPHY
https://www.zotero.org/stevedisme/items
Database focused on subjects like COINTELPRO, domestic security/intelligence, the security vs liberty balance, Constitutional (American) law re:security, leftism, islamism, propaganda, police intelligence, morality, neoconservatism, globalism, Information War, propaganda, and the Deep State

#strategy #tactics #justice #activism

7 years ago in #informationwar by stevescoins (69)

$36.68

Sort:

Trending

[-]

klevn (49) 7 years ago

mae brussels used to have a list of all the musicians that died since the 50s/60s.

everyone on that list brought a personal touch to their music, was generally bringing happiness. all of them were dying in freak plane crashes and drug overdoses well beyond the normal population. some blamed it on fame being to much for them, but i think our cia had a hand in removing those talented musicians because they were a leader of another type.

when malcom x came out of a jail with a man wrongfully accussed released, he used his hand to wave off the mob. police chief at the time said that is to much power for a man to have..

“You gotta remember, establishment, it’s just a name for evil. The monster doesn’t care whether it kills all the students or whether there’s a revolution. It’s not thinking logically, it’s out of control.”

—John Lennon (1969)

$0.52

2 votes

[-]

truthforce (68) 7 years ago

Nicely written and good details :)

my next contribution for the information war will be a short podcast that will highlight the dangers of listening to emotional appeals, and how data and facts are needed to see situations clearly and context matters. If we cannot state the facts and context and use data, we cannot actually solve a problem. Also, by using data context and facts we can determine if something is a problem, that is something many people are not doing. For example, the narrative about cops shooting unarmed black people is wrong. Statistically more white people are shot and killed by cops by a higher rate. Those shootings are "justified" at a very high rate, somewhere around 95%+ or something like that. So the unjustified shootings(cops illegally shot someone who wasn't a threat)are really low and are less than 100 per year. Out of 330million people that is a very insiginificant number, your chance of dying in a car accident is tens of thousands of times higher. But to a normal average person who watches news, listens to news, they don't have this data for a comparison. I will make these comparisons to show that it isn't a problem and the media is hyping things up. That is the context part we need more of, nobody is protestin driving cars despite them killing tens of thousands of people vs 100 people being unjustly killed by cops. Stuff like that!

I guess, "narrative descontruction" or something along those lines.

$0.14

2 votes

[-]

stevescoins (69) 7 years ago

make sure it goes under the infowar tag, and looking forward to it!