The Pentagon is pouring tens of millions of dollars into mathematical models that might one day help America’s armed forces win a counterinsurgency. Too bad the U.S. military is almost totally unprepared to model irregular warfare.

The Pentagon is interested in modeling because it’s a cheap, fast way to calculate whether your equipment and tactics will be effective against whatever the enemy is throwing against you. The problem is that, for years, modeling and simulation focused on conventional war with the Soviets. And it hasn’t quite adapted to today’s guerrilla conflicts, as I discovered when I wrote this article for Training & Simulation Journal. Which means a “Sim Afghanistan” won’t be ready for a long, long time — if it’s ever ready at all.

The Army’s traditional simulations focused on the sort of kinetic physics stuff that’s fairly easy to model: X number of M1 tanks firing at Y number of T-72s at Z meters will kill N number of targets. They were attrition-based systems that tended to favor whoever had the most firepower, but they didn’t address the intangibles of war, such as morale, training and leadership.

Now, the military is paying for that firepower focus as it grapples with simulating counterinsurgency. How do you model non-combat factors such as the reaction of an Afghan village to U.S. troops patrolling their streets? How do you mathematically calculate the effects of propaganda, psychological warfare, religion and economic hardship on the attitudes of a civilian population?

Continue Reading “Don’t Hold Your Breath for ‘Sim Afghanistan’” »

U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq would grind to a halt without an army of contract interpreters. These men and women — called “terps” in soldier slang — do so much more than the most sophisticated Phraselator ever could. Their cultural insights, and their ability to read the situation on the ground, can save lives.

But interpreters are often regarded with suspicion or disdain. And in some cases, they have been screwed over by their employers.

Enter Josh Foust. In a righteous New York Times op-ed, Foust details the injustices, small and large, that are routinely heaped on interpreters. Take the case of “Brooklyn,” a California-born interpreter who gets snubbed by an obtuse colonel as “that local woman”:

The next day, as we were driving between two bases, we ran into a traffic snarl at a bridge, with dozens of Afghan soldiers and police officers milling about. Our colonel, who had left his own translator back at his base, got out of his Humvee and asked Brooklyn to begin translating for him. After discussing the issue with the Afghan forces, she explained that they had found several bombs underneath the bridge, and were waiting for an American bomb disposal team to arrive. They had likely saved our lives, but we got that message only because we had an interpreter, the one the colonel had treated like an enemy spy the night before.

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Can a California-based company that takes its names from The Lord of the Rings solve the problem of terrorism? Perhaps not, but it may do a better job than traditional defense contractors.

An enthusiastic article in today’s Wall Street Journal describes Palantir Technologies, a thoroughly California software company that is earning accolades from inside the Beltway. “Palantir’s software has helped root out terrorist financing networks, revealed new trends in roadside bomb attacks, and uncovered details of Syrian suicide bombing networks in Iraq, according to current and former U.S. officials familiar with the events,” reports the Journal. “It has also foiled a Pakistani suicide bombing plot on Western targets and discovered a spy infiltration of an allied government. It is now being used by the Central Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

The company has received funding from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, which likely helps explain how the upstart company was able to break into the government market. Palantir has, as the Journal articles notes, a number of competitors among more established defense contractors. More Google than Lockheed, Palantir is known for its ahi tuna, video games, and a room painted with Care Bears.

Palantir’s software, according to the firm’s description, “enables human analysts to harness the power of computers in an intuitive way to quickly and deeply analyze large amounts of data. “The most interesting part of Palantir may be its approach to rooting out terrorist networks, which draws on PayPal’s model for identifying cybercriminals (the company was founded by former employees of PayPal and Stanford computer scientists). The system worked by drawing links between fraudulent transactions that, at first glance, seemed unrelated.

One thing, however, that the company does likes to emphasize about its software: it’s not doing data mining.

[PHOTO: Palantir]

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The Human Terrain System, the Army’s social-science program, has seen pay cuts, tragedy — and an exodus of talent. But plans are still in the works to boost the number of anthropologists and social scientists the Army has deployed overseas.

Writing yesterday in the Washington Post magazine, Vanessa Gezari gets to the heart of the matter. “The number of highly trained social scientists with extensive knowledge about Afghanistan and Iraq is extremely limited, and most of them don’t want anything to do with the military,” she writes.

Gezari profiles Karl Slaikeu, a conflict-resolution specialist with a psychology Ph.D., and Stephen James Lang, a bearish former Marine nicknamed “Banger,” both members of a Human Terrain Team in Afghanistan’s southern Kandahar Province. Gezari’s portrait is sympathetic, but one thing stands out: Neither Sleiku nor Lang have any prior Afghanistan experience.

Slaikeu, nicknamed “Oil Spot Spock” for his enthusiastic embrace of counterinsurgency theory, comes across as well-meaning: He forwards his own version of the “model village” concept (you can read his Small Wars Journal paper on “oil spot villages” here), and he keeps a watchful eye for a lapse in ethics (”It just hasn’t come,” he tells Gezari, “and I’ve been looking for it”). But his efforts to win friends in Afghan villages don’t seem to guarantee success. Despite their experiment in the district of Maywand, violence there continues to rise.

The article is part of a forthcoming book; we’ll be eager to read more.

[PHOTO: U.S. Department of Defense]

Continue Reading “‘Oil Spot Spock’ and the Human Terrain Team” »

If you think the U.S. military isn’t serious about this soft power, hearts-and-minds stuff, it’s worth considering a recent report by an Army Human Terrain System research team on saffron.

That’s right: The U.S. Army commissioned a detailed, heavily footnoted 22-page report on saffron as a potential cash crop for Afghan farmers — and as a potential alternative to growing opium poppy. In a nice touch, the report even includes a recipe for sabzi pilau: a Persian rice dish with saffron, spinach and meat. Delicious!

Devising alternative livelihoods for Afghan farmers involved in the poppy trade is a serious business, and thus far no one has been able to come up with a viable and sustainable alternative. For Afghanistan’s impoverished farmers, opium is almost ideal: it is a high-value, low weight crop that requires minimal water; the paste collected during the harvest is easy to store and transport; and the buyers come to directly to you.

Problem is, the illicit opium trade is an important source of financing for the Taliban and other insurgents. But U.S.-funded schemes to wean Afghan farmers off opium have, to borrow a phrase from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, been a heartbreaking failure. And as the HTS report notes, saffron is not likely to replace poppy as an alternative crop in terms of profitability.

“While saffron is significantly more profitable than crops such as wheat, onions, and chick peas, it is still less profitable than poppy,” the report states. “According to the figures, poppy is estimated to be more than 50% more profitable than saffron.”

Continue Reading “Army: Battle Taliban With… Saffron?” »

Are you a native speaker of Hausa, Sinhala or Pushtu? Are you an expert in some obscure corner of the north Caucasus or southern Sudan? U.S. Special Operations Command may have a job for you.

In testimony yesterday before the House Armed Services Committee, Adm. Eric Olson, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command, described an effort to boost the command’s in-house language skills and regional expertise — including a possible effort to recruit “scouts” with native language abilities.

Special Operations Command has already carved out career paths for individuals who are comfortable working in foreign cultures: Army Special Forces, for instance, has basic language proficiency requirements. But Olson suggested the special-ops community is looking for people with much deeper expertise.

“We have a long way to go in recognizing and incentivizing such expertise as an operational necessity before we can truly develop and sustain real experts in specific key regions around the world,” he said. “I call this ‘Project Lawrence,’ after T. E. Lawrence of Arabia.”

Among other options, the command is looking to Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest, a little-publicized pilot program that has allowed legal non-permanent residents (i.e., non Green Card-holders) with special language skills to join the Army. The program has been phenomenally successful in some ethnic communities: Koreans, for instance, have flocked the program, catching the Army somewhat off guard. Some of the most highly qualified candidates from the program, Olson said, will serve in special operations units.

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Iran has been accused of meddling in Afghanistan. But what influence does Tehran have, really, over Afghanistan’s affairs?

The Human Terrain System, Army’s social science program, recently investigated this question and found that, in one part of Afghanistan, Iran’s influence is largely limited to “soft power.”

A recent open-source research report prepared by HTS researchers in the United States and obtained by Danger Room probes the history of Iranian activities in Afghanistan’s Bamiyan province, from humanitarian assistance to direct military aid. As the report puts it, oh-so-blandly: “Iranian influence in Afghanistan, both positive and negative aspects, is a current topic of interest.”

You bet it is. While Tehran cooperated with Washington after the fall of the Taliban, relations have not improved substantially since then — and a few years ago, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates even claimed that Iran was turning a blind eye to Taliban weapons smuggling. Bamiyan is home to the Hazaras, who share historical ties to Iran: the Shia religion and Persian language. Equally important, many residents of Bamiyan have spent time working as migrant laborers in Iran.

As the report concludes, Iranian influence in Bamiyan isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Iran has helped rebuild schools, provide emergency food assistance and build libraries throughout Afghanistan. It is also a major investment partner: Iran has sunk money into Afghanistan’s power sector, agriculture and transportation grid. Iran, the report notes, can also have a subtle modernizing influence on Afghan visitors:  The report notes that Afghan women, in particular, “have returned to Bamiyan with greater interest in education or employment.”

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NPR’s Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson recently spent some time with a Special Forces team setting up the Afghan Public Protection Force, an experiment in giving weapons, cash, and authority to local militias to keep insurgents at bay.

It’s a repeat on a more modest scale of the ‘Sons of Iraq‘ program that helped restore order in Iraq’s Anbar province. But as Noah has pointed out here before, the real question is whether this “neighborhood watch” approach will translate to rural Afghanistan.

In today’s installment of her two-part series, Nelson accompanies the Green Berets to villages in Wardak Province. They find the villagers are reluctant to form units of the Public Protection Force — also known as the Guardians — and they are wary of the central government’s intentions. In the village of Karimdad, a Special Forces trooper named “Joe” tries to persuade residents to join the force:

Continue Reading “Finding ‘Sons of Afghanistan’ Ain’t Easy” »

The military has been trying for years to turn the chaos of war into a simple math problem. So far, those efforts have been trumped by a confluence of shaky variables: free will, tribal factions and chance being a few examples. But one physicist says he’s cracked the code. How’d he do it? He turned on the TV.

Sean Gourley, a New Zealander with a background in nanoscale lasers, just finished a fellowship at Oxford, where he spent five years trying to pare war down to mathematical principles.  Gourley wanted to find a consistent relationship between the size and structure of insurgency groups and the fatality of their attacks. This year, his work caught the attention of TED - the organization went so far as to credit him with discovering  “the hidden mathematical patterns of warfare” - and he recently summed up several years of number crunching in a seven-minute TED-sponsored lecture.

Thank a war-fueled TV news ticker for Gourley’s epiphany.  “There’s open source data here, and I thought we could grab it and use it to understand war,” Gourley tells Danger Room. For his research, Gourley collected data on the Iraq conflict from 130 different media sources, including American networks like CNN and international outlets like Al-Jazeera.

Reports in hand, Gourley and his colleagues compared the relationship between the frequency of attacks and the number of fatalities, and found a common mathematical distribution. The pattern emerged in studies of Colombia, Senegal, Afghanistan, and a handful of other modern conflicts. Same pattern, same graphical slope of 2.5. This “Alpha factor” represents the organizational structure (group size and strength) of wartime insurgencies.

With numbers crunched and graphs plotted, war became a single equation:

Probability of X people killed = C(x)^-2.5

It looks tidy, but Gourley ran into one little problem when he tried to put the formula to work: It didn’t. In his TED presentation, he admits he erred in predicting the outcome of 2007’s military surge in Iraq using his data. Gourley anticipated that the surge would push Alpha up, creating weaker, more fragmented insurgencies. It didn’t. Alpha shot down, and then stabilized to pre-2007 levels. Dr. Adam Russell, a D.C.-based social anthropologist, says this unpredictability is the root of the problem: “This Alpha factor is just observational – if it’s real at all.”

Continue Reading “Physicist’s Fool-Proof War Formula (Just Add Media Accounts)” »

Don Ayala — the U.S. Army contractor who pleaded guilty to a revenge killing in Afghanistan — won’t be going to prison. Instead, U.S. District Court Judge Claude Hilton sentenced Ayala, a member of the Army’s Human Terrain social science project, to five years probation and a $12,500 fine.

Ayala (pictured, left) began working in Afghanistan in late September, as part of a Human Terrain Team, which embeds cultural advisers in combat units. Originally, the program was conceived as a way to find for commanders nonviolent options for stabilizing chaotic areas: Islamic radio broadcasts to mollify Afghan mullahs, shame tactics to nudge out corrupt Iraqi cops. “In a counterinsurgency, your level of success is inversely proportional to the amount of lethal force that you expend,” lead social scientist Montgomery McFate told Danger Room.

But in a war zone, violence is never far off. Human Terrain teams became involved in several lethal incidents. The latest occurred on November 4th when Ayala was on a foot patrol in the village of Chehel Gazni, with teammate Paula Loyd (pictured, right). Loyd, a social scientist, approached Abdul Salam, who was carrying a fuel jug. He said he had bought it, to fuel up his motorcycle. They started talking about the price of gas. Suddenly, the man doused Lloyd in a flammable liquid and set her on fire, court documents recount.

Engulfed in a ball of flame large enough to force those near her to involuntarily back away, Paula Loyd screamed in agony as the children that had surrounded her ran away. In the several seconds following the attack, no one could get near enough to Ms. Loyd to help her. Panicked, Ms. Loyd ran around briefly before those near her pulled her to the ground. One of the platoon medics tried to put the fire out with dirt, ultimately grabbing Ms. Loyd by her foot and dragging her into the nearby drainage ditch to douse the flames. By the time the fire was extinguished, all of Ms. Loyd’s clothing had been burned off and only her helmet and body armor remained. Medical personnel would later determine that Ms. Loyd suffered second and third- degree burns over more than 60% of her body.

Ayala chased Salam down, tackled him to the ground, and restrained him with plastic cuffs. ”After about 10 minutes,” according to an Army Criminal Investigation Division affidavit, “a soldier approached the location where Ayala had Salam detained and informed the personnel in the area that Loyd was burned badly. Ayala pushed his pistol against Salam’s head and shot Salam, killing him instantly.”

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