His title today is Migration Digital Images of the Future of Insurgency.
John Kirby Well, thanks a lot for inviting me.
Also, first of all, that the book set out to explain how.
Mass migration and mass communications.
And the fact that we were now understanding the propaganda was due much more clearly than before transformed the nature of insurgency.
In fact, so swiftly that it transformed that the insurgents side picked up on that transformation rather more rapidly than the government did.
So that's the sort of stepping off point for this next 45 minutes.
And what I want to do this afternoon very quickly is to speculate.
From that stop point from the idea that insurgency is a constantly evolving and altering technique,
speculate where that takes us in terms of the future of expeditionary forces such as Afghanistan,
and also where that takes us in terms of understanding what that effect is on our own domestic security.
The problem about using words like terrorism and insurgency, which I get to do quite a lot,
is that there are of them really in the direction of Whitehall.
A lot of government departments, such as the Home Office,
the Ministry of Defence and a lot of academics and a lot of academic departments who have a sense of ownership
for these words and have very successfully boxed them in to tight little sentences which define them.
And that has a very repressive effect when you start to try thinking about insurgency,
which is, as I'm hoping to point out, is a very dynamic process.
So I'm asking you, in this hall after lunch draws, when you start to let go of things,
if you could also let go of the sort straightjacket in which these words live at the moment,
and try and come with me and think of a zero continuously evolving process which
is altering at much the same speed as the societies from which they arise.
Okay, so if you go back a century on the theme of transition, this evolutionary process,
which I'm trying to describe, had back in those days, looking at this timeline,
several different forms of insurrection ranging from the so anarchists in the streets of Europe
through the Irish nationalists out onto the sounds of the Arabian Desert with T.E. Lawrence.
And it wasn't really until morale began to address his cadres out in the field in the 1920s and thirties,
that this very ad hoc process of here became reduced to something on which you could transfer from one theatre to another,
or from one population to another, and later from one state to another, in the form of a doctrine.
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.
And as you would expect, when Mao stood up before his cadres, the doctrine that he spoke of conveyed and embodied principles and characteristics.
And in this model, you hardly see you see just enough to make this work.
Here I happen to be very good tested.
So I thought that if the population was wooed across to this side by the insurgents,
the probability was that the insurgent side of the campaign would prevail.
But if you shifted the sides and the government and the security forces naturally would move on to their side,
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.
And so if the main effort was to win over the population, then you had to expect that the insurgent organisation,
which was successful, had to create an organisation which had a predominantly political character rather than a military one.
On this chart, only 20% of these activities here are strictly military.
The main effort coming out of the organisation was about persuading, extorting, infiltrating, subverting and so forth.
And the interesting thing about it all in both that is that terrorism down here was just one of these options for the insurgents,
and it was definitely subordinated to the overall campaign, which was emphatically insurgent.
So terrorism wasn't such a big deal. Okay.
We'll forward to it. To the present, really.
And with the perspective of about 70 years hindsight, you can see that this Maoist model has some fairly important limitations.
It was very labour intensive. It was very narrowly territorial in its direction, and its structures were pretty rigid, fairly.
Top dumb ideas. Come on. Energy came in that direction to the footsoldiers at the bottom.
And so by the 1970s, this Maoist prototype had been so successful or against the post-colonial regimes began to come under pressure itself.
And the doctrinal certainties of that formula, which Mao stood up an election to his men about,
were being eroded by migration, by mass communications, and by the televisual image.
And terrorism, which had been such a diminutive part of this thing,
was now growing in importance and taking up a much more central position in the overall campaign.
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.
Here it is. It's fairly minimalist. It explains the migration factor.
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.
Would be somewhere in this area here, out here of China, South China, Sea, Pacific,
Australia, and in the centre here, the Middle East, the north coast of Africa.
And all you have left on this chart is the approximate location of the main populations living in the centre of both continents.
And you have to imagination that through a process of migration which has been taking place for about 400 years,
that the most enterprising and the strongest of these families have migrated out southwards into the southern hemisphere,
northwards into the Northern Hemisphere. And through that process they've established about 70 or so distinct communities in these other places where
they find themselves a minority marooned in a culturally different and ethnically different majority.
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.
And by the year 2007, every EU state has by now, that is, every native state,
certainly and possibly every you state has by now got a pretty sizeable migratory population at the top end of the scale.
Countries like France and Germany, about 6 million at the other end of the scale.
A country like Iceland has about 100,000 so far.
This is a totally benign process and these people move for very good humanitarian reasons.
They want to improve their families security.
They want a better opportunity to succeed in a place which is financially richer and more vibrant.
They want access to better living standards and conditions and so forth.
But towards the end of the 20th century, you started to have nationalist revivals in this area.
You know, it goes up and through into South Asia and these nationalist revivals.
Tended to lead to disturbances, led to insurgency, led to civil war and gradual escalation or enormous civil displacement,
in some cases, humanitarian disasters leading on to complex emergencies and so forth.
And speaking mainly of the chaotic nineties and that period,
and in some cases the rather unattractive or rather repressive regimes crack down on the dissident populations with a fairly unbearable brutality.
And that sent a stream of people who were deeply disaffected by their experience in their own country,
who joined those existing migratory flows which were heading northwards and southwards.
And these rather different people brought with them a bitter disaffection or and a fairly powerful sense of activism
arising from the insurgency that they had already been involved in and when they arrived in their new host countries.
That is, say, for example, in Europe, they tended to use these places as a safe base from which to carry on the subversion.
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,
there's no way that a future revolutionary figure of the stature of a future Mao or a future Lenin is
ever going to reach out and turn these isolated modes into some sort of a revolutionary constituency.
That is, until mass communications became a global reality, because that provided the missing dimension with mass communications,
it became possible for tiny minorities of similarly disaffected people who up to now find themselves scattered across the face of the earth,
to now locate each other across time zones and across space.
And this development was not happening because of some master plan hatched by al
Qaeda central sitting in a cave in the northwest frontier provinces of Pakistan.
It was happening because there was a much bigger social revolution going on across the world, like a landslide.
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,
the you too are very soon connected on to these international highways where network by network through the hubs and change the internet,
you join social organisations which are put you in touch with very different people from whom you spend most of the day with,
which are no longer defined by territory. Okay, so this is a very crude model.
Okay, but what I'm trying the point you're trying to make is migration dispersed these populations,
so that you could now find families of Somalis living in a wild place like Oslo so that you could find almost
entire villages from the middle poor district of Far East Pakistan living in the central UK towns like Rochdale.
You had that dispersal and the model also shows how in the 21st century mass communications now provided the
network so that these tiny minorities who had up to now been marooned somewhere on the surface of the world,
could now locate each other and animate each other and spark ideas of each other in
a way until a degree that would have been quite unthinkable ten years previously.
But in terms of organising this constituency into an insurgent force, we're still not there.
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.
And in this case, obviously, where this population is so dispersed, that effect, that shock has to be delivered virtually.
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.
You have to get them some other way. And that effect was known as propaganda of the deed.
The use of a violent image to explain a narrative or an act which could ignite a population that was already on the edge,
smouldering, and push them towards some sort of violent action.
When Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in December the 17th in Tunis,
it was the images and the narrative of this dramatic thing that he did that more or less
dropped that spark into a middle Eastern region that was already moving in that direction.
So the question is, how does this multiplying effect take place?
How did my academics explain the propaganda of the deed?
This is a definition that we call up in Kings College, or I'm sure because Oxford, you mention Timbuktu.
But that's all right. It's just as our starting point to explain what we meant by propaganda, the deed,
and the point about propaganda that it had by the 21st century become a defining characteristic of insurgencies,
especially insurgencies which arose from the constituency of a post-industrial society.
And the point is that propaganda,
which for decades had been a sort of peripheral activity or in that sort of portacabin across the or behind the loos,
was now moving centre stage into the middle of your headquarters to become an overpowering effect around which you organised your operation.
Fingered turn on its head from the perspective, from the perspective of the organisers.
The attack that implied by this graffiti was not about the dollar value damage done to the city of New York.
It wasn't about the emotional hurt that you did to the population of New York.
It wasn't about the fact that you tiny little micro organisation were challenging the US security in a very significant way.
The value to the insurgent organisation who perpetrated this thing was to send a massive electric shock to their own constituency.
That was the point.
So that when that casually supportive young man or woman all around the world saw this event unfolding itself endlessly on the screen,
as it did, after all, privately and in his own head, or in the privacy of his own apartment,
he danced and cheered as if his team had hit the winning goal at the World Cup final.
This image was powerful enough to send the recruiting figures for extremism,
extremist organisations, rocketing skywards and it created a whole rash of new extremist websites.
The hits on news websites also went rocketing.
SKYWARDS in the cells of the Koran also went amazingly upwards.
So how does that shock translate into insurgent energy at street level?
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.
It could be some 4 hours north of here.
It could be somewhere in Europe. It could be somewhere on the north coast of of Africa.
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.
And the energy is pumped around by the propaganda of the deed, which is a sort of heartbeat,
so that when that young man or woman sees those images on the screen,
it sends that person out on a journey of private, personal radicalisation so that they are associating more with other radical people.
So they are listening to radical lectures.
So they are downloading radical stuff on the television.
And while they do that somewhere on this curve here, they inevitably meet the the man who is genuinely from a hard wired international.
A terrorist organisation who in this function is the talent spotter and the transporter will get ahold of that very disillusioned young person
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.
Until finally there might even persuade them to go abroad,
where a properly swept up military organisation will teach the young person how to put a bomb together,
how to select a target, how to very importantly, how to avoid the security forces when they get back to their own country.
And finally, who knows that young person himself or herself becomes the centre of a future propaganda of the event.
So by the time, good grief, let's change colour, that should be pink.
And that should say model. That should be an extended line woven into the 21st century.
And by the time we reach the 21st century on this chart, this model has altered.
And what has happened is that what had been up to now, a fairly monolithic process,
is now taking on the sort of appearance of a trident and spread out into a number of four distinct forms,
which, from a military perspective, have important differences.
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,
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.
And Farrell refers to the sort of crude militias which move into that lawless vacuum.
We saw them fairly recently in some of that upheaval in Cote d'Ivoire.
You can see them now fairly regularly in somewhere like DRC, and obviously you get them in Europe as well.
And there was a certain amount of feral militia going on in the Balkans and the Black Sea states going up the scale.
The popular insurgency was the direct descendant of Maoism and examples still flourish or in this century,
obviously in Afghanistan, but also recently in Nepal, Sri Lanka and Thailand.
And then at the top of the scale, you have the globalised movements which arose from post-industrial societies such as our own.
And the point to note here is that the global insurgent, the globalised insurgent,
is the antithesis of the Maoist in some important ways, because the global version is de territorial ized.
The global version is almost labour free, informally structured.
It has the sort of organisational characteristics of an amoeba, its self-generating self, repairing organic without a head, without a tail.
And if governments and the security departments were keeping up with these developments,
they would by now have a doctrine which reflected these distinctions, because each one requires its own operational concept.
There isn't a one to fits all approach. Okay, so moving to the absolute present, we're still with the blue orb.
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.
And. What is happening here in particular is the sort of Facebook generation demonstrating its ability to challenge governments.
Challenge really? Any government could be a dysfunctional government from the north coast of Africa,
but it could be a very swept up democratically elected government in London.
They've done both, and they do it by surge messaging techniques on a massive scale,
which has the effect of bringing out a tidal wave of citizens into the centre of the capital.
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,
as I said before, globalisation, migration, mass communications.
But from the perspective of someone who's looking at the evolution of insurgency,
I think what governments have failed to notice that the techniques and practicalities
of practicalities of insurgency are actually altering at the same pace,
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
that takes us in terms of the utility of future expeditionary forces and the nature of our own domestic security.
Okay. For several reasons, the prospect of more expeditionary forces on the scale of Afghanistan is in doubt.
And I mean, it's fairly well exposed that there is a researched lack of public support.
They are extremely costly. And the there is not much conviction about the degree of success they achieve.
There is a fourth or perhaps less well exposed reason, which is that we really don't have an operational concept for doing them.
And one reason for this is that the campaign,
the the in the campaign that we can conduct is or other still hinges on the disposition of the population.
But the nature of the population has changed enormously in the last 50 years.
Going back to this slide here, which I'm glad there's still a rift there, it's gotten some blue, red here.
You remember that, for example, malaria when you spoke of population.
You could almost argue that in Maya you were speaking about one population.
I mean, you want to really picky. Are actually four populations. And then there was an additional population back home in U.K.
But the point I'm making about the malaria model, which is what this really is,
is that whether there were five populations or just two, it was a manageable entity.
You could persuade them about their disposition towards the campaign.
50 years later, that situation altered quite a lot.
And it involves several populations.
If this is the operational space, you now have the adjacent states who are around that space whose populations overlap into the operational space.
Further afield you have the concerned states who are connected to the issues in
that insurgent area because they have a similar ideology or religion or ethnicity.
Further afield, you have the elements of that state who have migrated outwards.
And on top of that, you have the intervening states.
And these are the people who are going to make up the international coalition.
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.
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,
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.
And where is the centre of gravity, by the way, on this chart?
Okay. The second reason why future coalitions on the scale of Afghanistan are unlikely is that in real politic terms,
the international expedition does not prevent or decrease the prospect of a terrorist attack in the streets of our homeland.
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.
And the reason for this is explained if you look at the altered nature of the adversary that we face in that place.
Okay. Oh, you're in.
Okay. So we're back on this slide here. That is the operational space.
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.
There is the sole local insurgent, the Silk Road bandit, border smuggler,
gang member, who you are from time to time, employed to take part in an operation.
And above that, rather more dangerous.
Therefore, for the government there is some sort of a national insurgency which is far more dangerous and better organised and better motivated.
And above that, you have this globally organised structure of insurgents who manifest themselves here under the heading of foreign fighters.
But typically they also have a part of their organisation,
a very important part which is spread across the insurgent archipelago and connected horizontally in a series of network flows,
which, if you destroy them, can very easily be grown again.
And so the headless terrorists on organic and by being in that configuration,
you now face an adversary which has far more depth than the one that you faced in the previous century.
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,
or you make the rest of the world a safer place and that you are actually dealing with the global dimension, as I said.
The campaign in Helmand seems to increase rather than reduce that possibility in this state.
And you're looking at an adversary now that has considerably greater operational agility.
It's tactically impulsive. It can switch its attack from the the operational space here out to somewhere else very swiftly.
It can attack that hotel used by the agencies in Kabul.
And within a week, it can switch its attack to an airport building or some other centre for the
population in a like a railway station in in the the coalition states own country.
And by doing that, it begins to move very easily inside our decision making loop.
Okay. This is the genuine blank which denotes Tahrir Square.
And the question is, what can we learn from what happened in Tahrir Square and similar places?
First of all, the doctrine of the adversary is dynamic.
And they move intuitively along the same evolutionary flow as the society from which they arise.
So in the case of a post-industrial Facebook crowd that is constantly tweeting and and texting.
You also expect to meet those techniques in the on the insurgent side, if that's what you're putting it up against.
And if that is what you're pitted up against, the chances are that you the security forces are vertically organised.
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,
which assembles at a focal point in a capital city and then marches through the city,
constantly altering its direction, rather like a flock of starlings, which moves in a formation in the sky.
And it makes those alterations with much greater agility than the force arrayed against it.
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,
what you see springing up in that place is in the form of a space somewhere in the square for bloggers,
a space or for artworks on the wall, newspaper walls, a wall of heroes, a stage.
So you can address the crowds and even things like crashes and pharmacies and cancer.
All these things sprout out of their own accord from something which is almost leaderless and horizontally formed.
But I'm not making a point about the politics of the Arab Spring.
What I'm trying to say is that we scarcely understand how that leading edge of an insurgent population,
of that insurgent energy, we scarcely understand how that works.
And institutionally, where a thousand miles to actually developing an operational concept of response, we do have options.
We have achieved quite a good doctrine for counter-insurgency.
And the problem about the doctrines that we have, both the US one and the UK one, is that they are both essentially Maoist.
They describe the ongoing campaign now, which is essentially expeditionary.
And if you regard that as a wave band, the only bit that they cover is the bit that I show.
And the problem is that the concept of the expeditionary force, which they articulate, is, is really rather a 19th century idea.
It's almost Victorian. Whereas the insurgency, the insurgent,
the especially the global end up here that I've been trying to describe to you is quintessentially a 21st century phenomenon.
So the question is this if this doctrine did describe that end of the spectrum more accurately, what would it have to include?
First of all, it would have to have a space in which it described the centrality of the virtual
dimension in the campaign and the fact that both sides now commit acts of violence,
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.
And the fact is that the insurgent completely understands that idea.
This is what our man saw him and had to say about it.
And obviously, his lieutenants ran with the ball to some extent.
And Army General David Richards completely understands this.
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.
But what is not clear is that below him there is a caucus of generals who also get it,
because if there is a caucus of generals below him who genuinely get it,
it hasn't become translated into any sort of doctrinal publication or doctrinal discussion.
What has happened is that we moved from this sort of thing to this sort of thing.
And in moving the terrorist act, which here it's very subordinate.
I'm part of a big political canvas of activities, too, here,
where the terrorist act becomes the central effect, becomes the whole sun and moon of the operation.
But that doesn't mean that this activity which is happening here,
is just about an act of terrorism and can therefore be engaged by a campaign of counter terrorism,
which is virtually what the Prevent Strategy, which was announced last week.
No, that is absolutely not the case. What is happening here is insurgent.
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.
What is happening here is essentially political.
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.
And it needs a commensurately serious response, which, like counterinsurgency, is essentially political.
It's the failure to show the difference between those two things and to understand the disparity between those two charts,
which is the measurement of how far behind we are in relationship to the insurgency.
And that's it. Thank you, John, very much indeed.
First.