1 00:00:00,840 --> 00:00:06,780 His title today is Migration Digital Images of the Future of Insurgency. 2 00:00:07,110 --> 00:00:11,520 John Kirby Well, thanks a lot for inviting me. 3 00:00:13,080 --> 00:00:17,640 Also, first of all, that the book set out to explain how. 4 00:00:18,360 --> 00:00:22,440 Mass migration and mass communications. 5 00:00:22,560 --> 00:00:34,470 And the fact that we were now understanding the propaganda was due much more clearly than before transformed the nature of insurgency. 6 00:00:35,580 --> 00:00:47,130 In fact, so swiftly that it transformed that the insurgents side picked up on that transformation rather more rapidly than the government did. 7 00:00:48,270 --> 00:00:55,290 So that's the sort of stepping off point for this next 45 minutes. 8 00:00:55,290 --> 00:00:59,310 And what I want to do this afternoon very quickly is to speculate. 9 00:01:01,290 --> 00:01:11,160 From that stop point from the idea that insurgency is a constantly evolving and altering technique, 10 00:01:12,720 --> 00:01:18,450 speculate where that takes us in terms of the future of expeditionary forces such as Afghanistan, 11 00:01:18,780 --> 00:01:27,930 and also where that takes us in terms of understanding what that effect is on our own domestic security. 12 00:01:30,390 --> 00:01:35,520 The problem about using words like terrorism and insurgency, which I get to do quite a lot, 13 00:01:35,850 --> 00:01:39,660 is that there are of them really in the direction of Whitehall. 14 00:01:40,350 --> 00:01:42,650 A lot of government departments, such as the Home Office, 15 00:01:42,670 --> 00:01:52,380 the Ministry of Defence and a lot of academics and a lot of academic departments who have a sense of ownership 16 00:01:52,530 --> 00:02:01,620 for these words and have very successfully boxed them in to tight little sentences which define them. 17 00:02:03,060 --> 00:02:10,830 And that has a very repressive effect when you start to try thinking about insurgency, 18 00:02:10,830 --> 00:02:15,690 which is, as I'm hoping to point out, is a very dynamic process. 19 00:02:16,530 --> 00:02:23,459 So I'm asking you, in this hall after lunch draws, when you start to let go of things, 20 00:02:23,460 --> 00:02:29,700 if you could also let go of the sort straightjacket in which these words live at the moment, 21 00:02:30,180 --> 00:02:38,850 and try and come with me and think of a zero continuously evolving process which 22 00:02:39,360 --> 00:02:46,020 is altering at much the same speed as the societies from which they arise. 23 00:02:46,920 --> 00:02:57,940 Okay, so if you go back a century on the theme of transition, this evolutionary process, 24 00:02:57,940 --> 00:03:03,750 which I'm trying to describe, had back in those days, looking at this timeline, 25 00:03:04,410 --> 00:03:14,520 several different forms of insurrection ranging from the so anarchists in the streets of Europe 26 00:03:15,240 --> 00:03:22,530 through the Irish nationalists out onto the sounds of the Arabian Desert with T.E. Lawrence. 27 00:03:23,280 --> 00:03:35,760 And it wasn't really until morale began to address his cadres out in the field in the 1920s and thirties, 28 00:03:36,270 --> 00:03:49,230 that this very ad hoc process of here became reduced to something on which you could transfer from one theatre to another, 29 00:03:49,610 --> 00:03:55,560 or from one population to another, and later from one state to another, in the form of a doctrine. 30 00:03:56,430 --> 00:04:06,840 And in this case, it was a doctrine for mass subversion by which populations could be subverted on an absolute industrial scale by the military. 31 00:04:08,970 --> 00:04:21,180 And as you would expect, when Mao stood up before his cadres, the doctrine that he spoke of conveyed and embodied principles and characteristics. 32 00:04:21,780 --> 00:04:28,360 And in this model, you hardly see you see just enough to make this work. 33 00:04:28,410 --> 00:04:33,090 Here I happen to be very good tested. 34 00:04:33,090 --> 00:04:41,430 So I thought that if the population was wooed across to this side by the insurgents, 35 00:04:41,940 --> 00:04:45,370 the probability was that the insurgent side of the campaign would prevail. 36 00:04:45,390 --> 00:04:52,440 But if you shifted the sides and the government and the security forces naturally would move on to their side, 37 00:04:52,710 --> 00:05:03,960 then the chances are that they would prevail. And the point being made was that the campaign turned on winning the popular support of the population. 38 00:05:04,860 --> 00:05:15,090 And so if the main effort was to win over the population, then you had to expect that the insurgent organisation, 39 00:05:15,810 --> 00:05:25,380 which was successful, had to create an organisation which had a predominantly political character rather than a military one. 40 00:05:25,530 --> 00:05:31,500 On this chart, only 20% of these activities here are strictly military. 41 00:05:31,740 --> 00:05:40,200 The main effort coming out of the organisation was about persuading, extorting, infiltrating, subverting and so forth. 42 00:05:41,250 --> 00:05:51,540 And the interesting thing about it all in both that is that terrorism down here was just one of these options for the insurgents, 43 00:05:51,930 --> 00:05:59,580 and it was definitely subordinated to the overall campaign, which was emphatically insurgent. 44 00:05:59,970 --> 00:06:03,480 So terrorism wasn't such a big deal. Okay. 45 00:06:04,320 --> 00:06:07,620 We'll forward to it. To the present, really. 46 00:06:07,620 --> 00:06:17,220 And with the perspective of about 70 years hindsight, you can see that this Maoist model has some fairly important limitations. 47 00:06:18,060 --> 00:06:28,560 It was very labour intensive. It was very narrowly territorial in its direction, and its structures were pretty rigid, fairly. 48 00:06:29,450 --> 00:06:36,230 Top dumb ideas. Come on. Energy came in that direction to the footsoldiers at the bottom. 49 00:06:37,610 --> 00:06:50,050 And so by the 1970s, this Maoist prototype had been so successful or against the post-colonial regimes began to come under pressure itself. 50 00:06:51,260 --> 00:06:56,660 And the doctrinal certainties of that formula, which Mao stood up an election to his men about, 51 00:06:57,050 --> 00:07:03,950 were being eroded by migration, by mass communications, and by the televisual image. 52 00:07:05,060 --> 00:07:10,280 And terrorism, which had been such a diminutive part of this thing, 53 00:07:10,730 --> 00:07:17,180 was now growing in importance and taking up a much more central position in the overall campaign. 54 00:07:17,840 --> 00:07:26,510 And I want to use a very crude model of which you will titter at slightly, even after lunch, to try and explain those ideas in greater detail. 55 00:07:26,780 --> 00:07:33,770 Here it is. It's fairly minimalist. It explains the migration factor. 56 00:07:34,820 --> 00:07:43,190 I mean, on this chart here, you have to imagine the map of the world has just been rubbed off while it was on the bottom of Africa. 57 00:07:43,190 --> 00:07:50,840 Would be somewhere in this area here, out here of China, South China, Sea, Pacific, 58 00:07:51,170 --> 00:07:55,790 Australia, and in the centre here, the Middle East, the north coast of Africa. 59 00:07:56,540 --> 00:08:07,550 And all you have left on this chart is the approximate location of the main populations living in the centre of both continents. 60 00:08:08,120 --> 00:08:15,230 And you have to imagination that through a process of migration which has been taking place for about 400 years, 61 00:08:15,710 --> 00:08:25,250 that the most enterprising and the strongest of these families have migrated out southwards into the southern hemisphere, 62 00:08:25,520 --> 00:08:36,169 northwards into the Northern Hemisphere. And through that process they've established about 70 or so distinct communities in these other places where 63 00:08:36,170 --> 00:08:44,990 they find themselves a minority marooned in a culturally different and ethnically different majority. 64 00:08:45,410 --> 00:08:58,340 And you have to imagine that by the year 2000, there are now 23 million Africans and Asians up there in the EU and beyond in Greater Europe. 65 00:08:58,670 --> 00:09:07,280 And by the year 2007, every EU state has by now, that is, every native state, 66 00:09:07,280 --> 00:09:14,720 certainly and possibly every you state has by now got a pretty sizeable migratory population at the top end of the scale. 67 00:09:14,900 --> 00:09:18,620 Countries like France and Germany, about 6 million at the other end of the scale. 68 00:09:18,620 --> 00:09:25,279 A country like Iceland has about 100,000 so far. 69 00:09:25,280 --> 00:09:31,730 This is a totally benign process and these people move for very good humanitarian reasons. 70 00:09:32,090 --> 00:09:35,720 They want to improve their families security. 71 00:09:36,290 --> 00:09:42,770 They want a better opportunity to succeed in a place which is financially richer and more vibrant. 72 00:09:43,340 --> 00:09:47,510 They want access to better living standards and conditions and so forth. 73 00:09:49,460 --> 00:09:57,950 But towards the end of the 20th century, you started to have nationalist revivals in this area. 74 00:09:58,060 --> 00:10:05,540 You know, it goes up and through into South Asia and these nationalist revivals. 75 00:10:09,380 --> 00:10:19,030 Tended to lead to disturbances, led to insurgency, led to civil war and gradual escalation or enormous civil displacement, 76 00:10:19,040 --> 00:10:24,350 in some cases, humanitarian disasters leading on to complex emergencies and so forth. 77 00:10:24,820 --> 00:10:29,540 And speaking mainly of the chaotic nineties and that period, 78 00:10:29,750 --> 00:10:44,989 and in some cases the rather unattractive or rather repressive regimes crack down on the dissident populations with a fairly unbearable brutality. 79 00:10:44,990 --> 00:10:54,770 And that sent a stream of people who were deeply disaffected by their experience in their own country, 80 00:10:55,640 --> 00:11:02,180 who joined those existing migratory flows which were heading northwards and southwards. 81 00:11:02,180 --> 00:11:13,190 And these rather different people brought with them a bitter disaffection or and a fairly powerful sense of activism 82 00:11:13,340 --> 00:11:21,180 arising from the insurgency that they had already been involved in and when they arrived in their new host countries. 83 00:11:21,200 --> 00:11:30,500 That is, say, for example, in Europe, they tended to use these places as a safe base from which to carry on the subversion. 84 00:11:32,450 --> 00:11:43,940 Now, as long as that pattern of random violence has no sort of unifying structure and that sort of marooned out here on the face of the Earth, 85 00:11:45,200 --> 00:11:52,069 there's no way that a future revolutionary figure of the stature of a future Mao or a future Lenin is 86 00:11:52,070 --> 00:12:01,760 ever going to reach out and turn these isolated modes into some sort of a revolutionary constituency. 87 00:12:02,450 --> 00:12:12,200 That is, until mass communications became a global reality, because that provided the missing dimension with mass communications, 88 00:12:12,200 --> 00:12:22,700 it became possible for tiny minorities of similarly disaffected people who up to now find themselves scattered across the face of the earth, 89 00:12:24,200 --> 00:12:29,690 to now locate each other across time zones and across space. 90 00:12:30,350 --> 00:12:37,940 And this development was not happening because of some master plan hatched by al 91 00:12:37,940 --> 00:12:43,280 Qaeda central sitting in a cave in the northwest frontier provinces of Pakistan. 92 00:12:43,280 --> 00:12:52,820 It was happening because there was a much bigger social revolution going on across the world, like a landslide. 93 00:12:53,300 --> 00:13:01,940 And we were all part of that. We are all part of that. If you reach into your pocket and grasp hold of that little plastic machine that you have, 94 00:13:01,940 --> 00:13:12,110 the you too are very soon connected on to these international highways where network by network through the hubs and change the internet, 95 00:13:12,350 --> 00:13:25,490 you join social organisations which are put you in touch with very different people from whom you spend most of the day with, 96 00:13:25,910 --> 00:13:34,549 which are no longer defined by territory. Okay, so this is a very crude model. 97 00:13:34,550 --> 00:13:40,910 Okay, but what I'm trying the point you're trying to make is migration dispersed these populations, 98 00:13:40,970 --> 00:13:48,740 so that you could now find families of Somalis living in a wild place like Oslo so that you could find almost 99 00:13:48,740 --> 00:13:58,070 entire villages from the middle poor district of Far East Pakistan living in the central UK towns like Rochdale. 100 00:13:58,730 --> 00:14:05,750 You had that dispersal and the model also shows how in the 21st century mass communications now provided the 101 00:14:05,750 --> 00:14:12,440 network so that these tiny minorities who had up to now been marooned somewhere on the surface of the world, 102 00:14:12,800 --> 00:14:19,129 could now locate each other and animate each other and spark ideas of each other in 103 00:14:19,130 --> 00:14:23,660 a way until a degree that would have been quite unthinkable ten years previously. 104 00:14:25,430 --> 00:14:35,300 But in terms of organising this constituency into an insurgent force, we're still not there. 105 00:14:35,630 --> 00:14:48,440 We're still missing something which would have to be so shocking and so arresting that it could bring a selected part of this population to the boil. 106 00:14:49,940 --> 00:14:59,720 And in this case, obviously, where this population is so dispersed, that effect, that shock has to be delivered virtually. 107 00:14:59,960 --> 00:15:08,000 It's not something that a man can do or a woman can do by wandering around the world in a white toga, preaching to people in the street. 108 00:15:08,430 --> 00:15:14,530 You have to get them some other way. And that effect was known as propaganda of the deed. 109 00:15:14,970 --> 00:15:26,670 The use of a violent image to explain a narrative or an act which could ignite a population that was already on the edge, 110 00:15:26,940 --> 00:15:33,090 smouldering, and push them towards some sort of violent action. 111 00:15:34,140 --> 00:15:39,000 When Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in December the 17th in Tunis, 112 00:15:39,780 --> 00:15:47,370 it was the images and the narrative of this dramatic thing that he did that more or less 113 00:15:47,790 --> 00:15:54,120 dropped that spark into a middle Eastern region that was already moving in that direction. 114 00:15:54,510 --> 00:15:58,700 So the question is, how does this multiplying effect take place? 115 00:15:58,710 --> 00:16:02,640 How did my academics explain the propaganda of the deed? 116 00:16:03,900 --> 00:16:10,500 This is a definition that we call up in Kings College, or I'm sure because Oxford, you mention Timbuktu. 117 00:16:11,130 --> 00:16:17,550 But that's all right. It's just as our starting point to explain what we meant by propaganda, the deed, 118 00:16:18,480 --> 00:16:26,520 and the point about propaganda that it had by the 21st century become a defining characteristic of insurgencies, 119 00:16:26,790 --> 00:16:34,410 especially insurgencies which arose from the constituency of a post-industrial society. 120 00:16:34,830 --> 00:16:37,230 And the point is that propaganda, 121 00:16:37,350 --> 00:16:47,790 which for decades had been a sort of peripheral activity or in that sort of portacabin across the or behind the loos, 122 00:16:48,000 --> 00:16:58,980 was now moving centre stage into the middle of your headquarters to become an overpowering effect around which you organised your operation. 123 00:16:59,070 --> 00:17:04,740 Fingered turn on its head from the perspective, from the perspective of the organisers. 124 00:17:06,090 --> 00:17:16,320 The attack that implied by this graffiti was not about the dollar value damage done to the city of New York. 125 00:17:16,560 --> 00:17:21,510 It wasn't about the emotional hurt that you did to the population of New York. 126 00:17:21,660 --> 00:17:32,430 It wasn't about the fact that you tiny little micro organisation were challenging the US security in a very significant way. 127 00:17:32,610 --> 00:17:43,770 The value to the insurgent organisation who perpetrated this thing was to send a massive electric shock to their own constituency. 128 00:17:43,890 --> 00:17:44,850 That was the point. 129 00:17:46,500 --> 00:17:56,610 So that when that casually supportive young man or woman all around the world saw this event unfolding itself endlessly on the screen, 130 00:17:56,610 --> 00:18:07,860 as it did, after all, privately and in his own head, or in the privacy of his own apartment, 131 00:18:08,730 --> 00:18:15,800 he danced and cheered as if his team had hit the winning goal at the World Cup final. 132 00:18:15,810 --> 00:18:22,110 This image was powerful enough to send the recruiting figures for extremism, 133 00:18:22,290 --> 00:18:29,730 extremist organisations, rocketing skywards and it created a whole rash of new extremist websites. 134 00:18:30,120 --> 00:18:33,689 The hits on news websites also went rocketing. 135 00:18:33,690 --> 00:18:40,170 SKYWARDS in the cells of the Koran also went amazingly upwards. 136 00:18:41,040 --> 00:18:46,590 So how does that shock translate into insurgent energy at street level? 137 00:18:49,140 --> 00:18:59,879 Yes, this is not much of a slope, but I will explain it because I read this is my best effort to explain what happens in a sort of industrial town. 138 00:18:59,880 --> 00:19:04,710 It could be some 4 hours north of here. 139 00:19:04,740 --> 00:19:08,640 It could be somewhere in Europe. It could be somewhere on the north coast of of Africa. 140 00:19:10,020 --> 00:19:23,760 And this chart shows a series of network flows in a community like a of borough council community and which are like the blood vessels on a mammal. 141 00:19:24,210 --> 00:19:29,580 And the energy is pumped around by the propaganda of the deed, which is a sort of heartbeat, 142 00:19:29,970 --> 00:19:35,400 so that when that young man or woman sees those images on the screen, 143 00:19:35,880 --> 00:19:47,100 it sends that person out on a journey of private, personal radicalisation so that they are associating more with other radical people. 144 00:19:47,340 --> 00:19:51,299 So they are listening to radical lectures. 145 00:19:51,300 --> 00:19:54,600 So they are downloading radical stuff on the television. 146 00:19:54,600 --> 00:20:08,040 And while they do that somewhere on this curve here, they inevitably meet the the man who is genuinely from a hard wired international. 147 00:20:08,080 --> 00:20:18,190 A terrorist organisation who in this function is the talent spotter and the transporter will get ahold of that very disillusioned young person 148 00:20:18,190 --> 00:20:31,899 and begin to groom his or her and begin to introduce him into even wilder and more extreme groups and literature and visual images and so forth. 149 00:20:31,900 --> 00:20:36,220 Until finally there might even persuade them to go abroad, 150 00:20:36,700 --> 00:20:44,140 where a properly swept up military organisation will teach the young person how to put a bomb together, 151 00:20:44,320 --> 00:20:54,280 how to select a target, how to very importantly, how to avoid the security forces when they get back to their own country. 152 00:20:54,460 --> 00:21:05,230 And finally, who knows that young person himself or herself becomes the centre of a future propaganda of the event. 153 00:21:07,830 --> 00:21:12,180 So by the time, good grief, let's change colour, that should be pink. 154 00:21:12,570 --> 00:21:21,690 And that should say model. That should be an extended line woven into the 21st century. 155 00:21:21,960 --> 00:21:27,600 And by the time we reach the 21st century on this chart, this model has altered. 156 00:21:27,900 --> 00:21:33,240 And what has happened is that what had been up to now, a fairly monolithic process, 157 00:21:33,240 --> 00:21:42,780 is now taking on the sort of appearance of a trident and spread out into a number of four distinct forms, 158 00:21:43,560 --> 00:21:48,780 which, from a military perspective, have important differences. 159 00:21:49,770 --> 00:22:03,600 Okay. If you think of these as being organised in an escalating ladder of effectiveness, at the very bottom of this ladder is the feral uprising, 160 00:22:04,530 --> 00:22:15,510 which you would find in the sort of collapsed state where society is flat on its back, where government and the security forces have gone. 161 00:22:15,990 --> 00:22:22,770 And Farrell refers to the sort of crude militias which move into that lawless vacuum. 162 00:22:24,450 --> 00:22:30,120 We saw them fairly recently in some of that upheaval in Cote d'Ivoire. 163 00:22:30,630 --> 00:22:37,730 You can see them now fairly regularly in somewhere like DRC, and obviously you get them in Europe as well. 164 00:22:37,740 --> 00:22:46,500 And there was a certain amount of feral militia going on in the Balkans and the Black Sea states going up the scale. 165 00:22:46,500 --> 00:22:54,780 The popular insurgency was the direct descendant of Maoism and examples still flourish or in this century, 166 00:22:54,780 --> 00:23:00,990 obviously in Afghanistan, but also recently in Nepal, Sri Lanka and Thailand. 167 00:23:01,320 --> 00:23:10,650 And then at the top of the scale, you have the globalised movements which arose from post-industrial societies such as our own. 168 00:23:11,700 --> 00:23:16,859 And the point to note here is that the global insurgent, the globalised insurgent, 169 00:23:16,860 --> 00:23:24,900 is the antithesis of the Maoist in some important ways, because the global version is de territorial ized. 170 00:23:25,530 --> 00:23:29,219 The global version is almost labour free, informally structured. 171 00:23:29,220 --> 00:23:37,830 It has the sort of organisational characteristics of an amoeba, its self-generating self, repairing organic without a head, without a tail. 172 00:23:39,540 --> 00:23:45,900 And if governments and the security departments were keeping up with these developments, 173 00:23:46,260 --> 00:23:56,870 they would by now have a doctrine which reflected these distinctions, because each one requires its own operational concept. 174 00:23:56,880 --> 00:24:06,720 There isn't a one to fits all approach. Okay, so moving to the absolute present, we're still with the blue orb. 175 00:24:06,720 --> 00:24:19,200 You see how that goes on from the last one. This process goes rampaging on and we've got a new prong to our trident, which is the smart mob. 176 00:24:21,390 --> 00:24:35,610 And. What is happening here in particular is the sort of Facebook generation demonstrating its ability to challenge governments. 177 00:24:35,700 --> 00:24:40,650 Challenge really? Any government could be a dysfunctional government from the north coast of Africa, 178 00:24:40,920 --> 00:24:45,960 but it could be a very swept up democratically elected government in London. 179 00:24:46,380 --> 00:24:51,840 They've done both, and they do it by surge messaging techniques on a massive scale, 180 00:24:51,840 --> 00:24:58,500 which has the effect of bringing out a tidal wave of citizens into the centre of the capital. 181 00:24:58,950 --> 00:25:11,069 And the point about this chart here is that all societies all over the world in this space of time here have been altering at a dramatic place with, 182 00:25:11,070 --> 00:25:14,670 as I said before, globalisation, migration, mass communications. 183 00:25:15,030 --> 00:25:20,670 But from the perspective of someone who's looking at the evolution of insurgency, 184 00:25:22,020 --> 00:25:27,169 I think what governments have failed to notice that the techniques and practicalities 185 00:25:27,170 --> 00:25:31,020 of practicalities of insurgency are actually altering at the same pace, 186 00:25:31,260 --> 00:25:42,930 at the same speed. So what I want to do is to use that assumption about this very swiftly evolving nature of insurgency to speculate where 187 00:25:42,930 --> 00:25:52,380 that takes us in terms of the utility of future expeditionary forces and the nature of our own domestic security. 188 00:25:53,700 --> 00:26:05,040 Okay. For several reasons, the prospect of more expeditionary forces on the scale of Afghanistan is in doubt. 189 00:26:05,370 --> 00:26:11,340 And I mean, it's fairly well exposed that there is a researched lack of public support. 190 00:26:11,700 --> 00:26:19,200 They are extremely costly. And the there is not much conviction about the degree of success they achieve. 191 00:26:20,160 --> 00:26:30,270 There is a fourth or perhaps less well exposed reason, which is that we really don't have an operational concept for doing them. 192 00:26:31,140 --> 00:26:34,590 And one reason for this is that the campaign, 193 00:26:35,050 --> 00:26:46,500 the the in the campaign that we can conduct is or other still hinges on the disposition of the population. 194 00:26:48,630 --> 00:26:55,920 But the nature of the population has changed enormously in the last 50 years. 195 00:26:56,130 --> 00:27:02,220 Going back to this slide here, which I'm glad there's still a rift there, it's gotten some blue, red here. 196 00:27:03,540 --> 00:27:08,520 You remember that, for example, malaria when you spoke of population. 197 00:27:11,170 --> 00:27:15,370 You could almost argue that in Maya you were speaking about one population. 198 00:27:16,090 --> 00:27:22,720 I mean, you want to really picky. Are actually four populations. And then there was an additional population back home in U.K. 199 00:27:23,320 --> 00:27:27,790 But the point I'm making about the malaria model, which is what this really is, 200 00:27:28,060 --> 00:27:34,930 is that whether there were five populations or just two, it was a manageable entity. 201 00:27:34,940 --> 00:27:41,020 You could persuade them about their disposition towards the campaign. 202 00:27:41,560 --> 00:27:45,250 50 years later, that situation altered quite a lot. 203 00:27:46,150 --> 00:27:49,600 And it involves several populations. 204 00:27:49,630 --> 00:28:04,330 If this is the operational space, you now have the adjacent states who are around that space whose populations overlap into the operational space. 205 00:28:04,900 --> 00:28:12,459 Further afield you have the concerned states who are connected to the issues in 206 00:28:12,460 --> 00:28:18,790 that insurgent area because they have a similar ideology or religion or ethnicity. 207 00:28:19,270 --> 00:28:24,640 Further afield, you have the elements of that state who have migrated outwards. 208 00:28:25,000 --> 00:28:28,630 And on top of that, you have the intervening states. 209 00:28:29,230 --> 00:28:34,150 And these are the people who are going to make up the international coalition. 210 00:28:35,140 --> 00:28:49,360 And the interesting thing is to note is how these states very often contain an element of the population to which they're about to send the force. 211 00:28:49,960 --> 00:29:02,190 The point I'm making is that the idea of wooing the population, Poppy, as in the first equation to your side, to your side of the campaign, 212 00:29:02,530 --> 00:29:13,090 a campaign which in the past hinged on the disposition of the population is now in the 21st century, infinitely more complicated than it was before. 213 00:29:13,870 --> 00:29:17,800 And where is the centre of gravity, by the way, on this chart? 214 00:29:18,580 --> 00:29:28,810 Okay. The second reason why future coalitions on the scale of Afghanistan are unlikely is that in real politic terms, 215 00:29:30,100 --> 00:29:42,309 the international expedition does not prevent or decrease the prospect of a terrorist attack in the streets of our homeland. 216 00:29:42,310 --> 00:29:54,790 Cities, in fact, are a lot of people who work in the NGOs at the frontlines in our UK cities argue that it actually increases that likelihood. 217 00:29:55,600 --> 00:30:04,930 And the reason for this is explained if you look at the altered nature of the adversary that we face in that place. 218 00:30:05,830 --> 00:30:10,440 Okay. Oh, you're in. 219 00:30:10,550 --> 00:30:14,260 Okay. So we're back on this slide here. That is the operational space. 220 00:30:14,530 --> 00:30:23,080 And it is there are two, possibly three different kinds of adversary which we could encounter, obviously, right down on the bottom of the food chain. 221 00:30:23,320 --> 00:30:28,600 There is the sole local insurgent, the Silk Road bandit, border smuggler, 222 00:30:29,350 --> 00:30:34,270 gang member, who you are from time to time, employed to take part in an operation. 223 00:30:34,510 --> 00:30:36,819 And above that, rather more dangerous. 224 00:30:36,820 --> 00:30:44,890 Therefore, for the government there is some sort of a national insurgency which is far more dangerous and better organised and better motivated. 225 00:30:45,100 --> 00:30:57,220 And above that, you have this globally organised structure of insurgents who manifest themselves here under the heading of foreign fighters. 226 00:30:58,870 --> 00:31:03,670 But typically they also have a part of their organisation, 227 00:31:04,150 --> 00:31:13,870 a very important part which is spread across the insurgent archipelago and connected horizontally in a series of network flows, 228 00:31:14,110 --> 00:31:17,980 which, if you destroy them, can very easily be grown again. 229 00:31:18,760 --> 00:31:25,630 And so the headless terrorists on organic and by being in that configuration, 230 00:31:26,050 --> 00:31:34,180 you now face an adversary which has far more depth than the one that you faced in the previous century. 231 00:31:34,540 --> 00:31:42,670 But you can't assume any longer that by attacking it, then you make much difference to what's going to happen in your own country, 232 00:31:42,880 --> 00:31:52,030 or you make the rest of the world a safer place and that you are actually dealing with the global dimension, as I said. 233 00:31:52,300 --> 00:31:59,710 The campaign in Helmand seems to increase rather than reduce that possibility in this state. 234 00:32:01,600 --> 00:32:09,130 And you're looking at an adversary now that has considerably greater operational agility. 235 00:32:10,050 --> 00:32:21,400 It's tactically impulsive. It can switch its attack from the the operational space here out to somewhere else very swiftly. 236 00:32:21,400 --> 00:32:26,400 It can attack that hotel used by the agencies in Kabul. 237 00:32:26,670 --> 00:32:35,190 And within a week, it can switch its attack to an airport building or some other centre for the 238 00:32:35,190 --> 00:32:43,230 population in a like a railway station in in the the coalition states own country. 239 00:32:43,380 --> 00:32:51,300 And by doing that, it begins to move very easily inside our decision making loop. 240 00:32:52,140 --> 00:32:57,150 Okay. This is the genuine blank which denotes Tahrir Square. 241 00:32:57,750 --> 00:33:03,300 And the question is, what can we learn from what happened in Tahrir Square and similar places? 242 00:33:04,410 --> 00:33:09,660 First of all, the doctrine of the adversary is dynamic. 243 00:33:11,770 --> 00:33:19,000 And they move intuitively along the same evolutionary flow as the society from which they arise. 244 00:33:19,020 --> 00:33:27,820 So in the case of a post-industrial Facebook crowd that is constantly tweeting and and texting. 245 00:33:28,090 --> 00:33:35,290 You also expect to meet those techniques in the on the insurgent side, if that's what you're putting it up against. 246 00:33:36,130 --> 00:33:44,110 And if that is what you're pitted up against, the chances are that you the security forces are vertically organised. 247 00:33:44,380 --> 00:33:56,860 And it's very hard for a vertically organised counter insurgent force to keep up with a leaderless mass, as you had it, in Tahrir Square, 248 00:33:57,130 --> 00:34:03,100 which assembles at a focal point in a capital city and then marches through the city, 249 00:34:03,910 --> 00:34:13,210 constantly altering its direction, rather like a flock of starlings, which moves in a formation in the sky. 250 00:34:14,170 --> 00:34:19,960 And it makes those alterations with much greater agility than the force arrayed against it. 251 00:34:20,590 --> 00:34:31,300 And then when they occupy that central position, or as they did in Kiev very successfully and also in Cairo, sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks, 252 00:34:32,080 --> 00:34:39,909 what you see springing up in that place is in the form of a space somewhere in the square for bloggers, 253 00:34:39,910 --> 00:34:46,630 a space or for artworks on the wall, newspaper walls, a wall of heroes, a stage. 254 00:34:47,170 --> 00:34:51,880 So you can address the crowds and even things like crashes and pharmacies and cancer. 255 00:34:52,030 --> 00:35:01,150 All these things sprout out of their own accord from something which is almost leaderless and horizontally formed. 256 00:35:01,950 --> 00:35:04,870 But I'm not making a point about the politics of the Arab Spring. 257 00:35:05,800 --> 00:35:15,010 What I'm trying to say is that we scarcely understand how that leading edge of an insurgent population, 258 00:35:15,010 --> 00:35:19,570 of that insurgent energy, we scarcely understand how that works. 259 00:35:20,230 --> 00:35:27,790 And institutionally, where a thousand miles to actually developing an operational concept of response, we do have options. 260 00:35:28,900 --> 00:35:31,480 We have achieved quite a good doctrine for counter-insurgency. 261 00:35:33,010 --> 00:35:42,220 And the problem about the doctrines that we have, both the US one and the UK one, is that they are both essentially Maoist. 262 00:35:43,480 --> 00:35:49,900 They describe the ongoing campaign now, which is essentially expeditionary. 263 00:35:50,380 --> 00:35:56,560 And if you regard that as a wave band, the only bit that they cover is the bit that I show. 264 00:35:57,580 --> 00:36:07,480 And the problem is that the concept of the expeditionary force, which they articulate, is, is really rather a 19th century idea. 265 00:36:08,050 --> 00:36:13,610 It's almost Victorian. Whereas the insurgency, the insurgent, 266 00:36:13,630 --> 00:36:22,930 the especially the global end up here that I've been trying to describe to you is quintessentially a 21st century phenomenon. 267 00:36:23,950 --> 00:36:33,700 So the question is this if this doctrine did describe that end of the spectrum more accurately, what would it have to include? 268 00:36:35,110 --> 00:36:43,239 First of all, it would have to have a space in which it described the centrality of the virtual 269 00:36:43,240 --> 00:36:50,320 dimension in the campaign and the fact that both sides now commit acts of violence, 270 00:36:50,680 --> 00:37:02,020 not in order to win tactical objectives on the ground, but in order to win space in the media and win space in the mind. 271 00:37:02,290 --> 00:37:07,180 And the fact is that the insurgent completely understands that idea. 272 00:37:07,270 --> 00:37:11,170 This is what our man saw him and had to say about it. 273 00:37:13,030 --> 00:37:16,570 And obviously, his lieutenants ran with the ball to some extent. 274 00:37:16,960 --> 00:37:21,850 And Army General David Richards completely understands this. 275 00:37:22,270 --> 00:37:29,440 And he is sharp as a blade. And that's what he has to say about it and more if you really look around the Internet. 276 00:37:30,010 --> 00:37:37,660 But what is not clear is that below him there is a caucus of generals who also get it, 277 00:37:38,800 --> 00:37:42,820 because if there is a caucus of generals below him who genuinely get it, 278 00:37:44,590 --> 00:37:53,500 it hasn't become translated into any sort of doctrinal publication or doctrinal discussion. 279 00:37:54,880 --> 00:38:04,600 What has happened is that we moved from this sort of thing to this sort of thing. 280 00:38:05,650 --> 00:38:11,080 And in moving the terrorist act, which here it's very subordinate. 281 00:38:11,810 --> 00:38:18,110 I'm part of a big political canvas of activities, too, here, 282 00:38:18,350 --> 00:38:26,240 where the terrorist act becomes the central effect, becomes the whole sun and moon of the operation. 283 00:38:28,340 --> 00:38:33,140 But that doesn't mean that this activity which is happening here, 284 00:38:34,220 --> 00:38:43,220 is just about an act of terrorism and can therefore be engaged by a campaign of counter terrorism, 285 00:38:43,220 --> 00:38:47,250 which is virtually what the Prevent Strategy, which was announced last week. 286 00:38:47,410 --> 00:38:53,570 No, that is absolutely not the case. What is happening here is insurgent. 287 00:38:53,840 --> 00:39:01,340 Go back to your Latin and think dynamically about that instead of allowing it to become boxed into all of those Ministry of Defence definitions. 288 00:39:02,090 --> 00:39:04,880 What is happening here is essentially political. 289 00:39:05,030 --> 00:39:14,810 It involves a population that depicts the various things that are happening in the population and is much more serious than just an act of terrorism. 290 00:39:14,930 --> 00:39:23,290 And it needs a commensurately serious response, which, like counterinsurgency, is essentially political. 291 00:39:23,300 --> 00:39:32,240 It's the failure to show the difference between those two things and to understand the disparity between those two charts, 292 00:39:32,240 --> 00:39:37,460 which is the measurement of how far behind we are in relationship to the insurgency. 293 00:39:40,530 --> 00:39:43,920 And that's it. Thank you, John, very much indeed. 294 00:39:44,790 --> 00:39:45,070 First.