The Once-Future Front; Now Actual 04/15/2010
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Defense, Global, Journalism, Policy, Politics, Technology, Web.comments closed
WHEN the cult hit WarGames was released in 1983, a film about a high school hacker and his friend using their idle time to play with N.O.R.A.D.‘s networks, the future of unconventional war was on display, before anyone truly knew it. I suspect that many at the Pentagon did, as any omen in a movie would have already been dreamed up in their analysts’ forecasts, particularly since it is well-known that any communication network that transmits information is especially vulnerable to the outside, by virtue of its architecture; but still, they couldn’t have seen all of this, and certainly not to this degree: with the increasing dominance of robotic, remote combat, the rise of virtual wars in cyberspace that take place every minute of every day, between nation-states, non-state actors, and plain, old, curious individuals.
Just 20 years ago, around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, combat, both future and present, in military circles, still seemed to be centered around big, swirling battles on multiple fronts, like that of W.W.II. The idea then was that war would still be largely conventional, and the defense industry was to prepare for it. What is known as low intensity operations — or low intensity conflict, the kind of conflicts we tend to see now, that are smaller in scale — were still viewed as an exception to the established doctrine, as opposed to the norm it seems likely to be for some time, due to the interconnections of a global market economy making war of any other kind very dicey without alliances for trade goods. But since Vietnam, the old doctrine doesn’t appear to hold water at all, and it seems every major war since then involving nation-states has been what is known as “asymmetric.” (And Vietnam was actually asymmetric.) The term refers to the balance of power in a conflict. Typically, in asymmetric warfare one actor is a powerful nation — both in treasure and military might — and the other isn’t, and so the lesser powered nation (or combatant) is forced to use a strategy that levels the playing field through methods such as decentralization of its forces, guerrilla tactics, surprise attacks and terror.
With the dawn of the Internet Age in the early ’90s to mid ’90s, it became alluring to those with know-how but little resources, to begin to experiment with and penetrate the connectivity of the world’s dominant powers. Because in the virtual world, decentralization is the prevailing norm, it was further to their advantage. There isn’t just one network, there are several networks; to jump in and out of, to hide in, to use as a mask and conduct similar operations as that of traditional, real-world asymmetric wars, except now there is (maybe) less blood and an almost limitless impact, because everything about our lives and our governments, is online, mostly.
Recently National Public Radio (N.P.R.) aired a segment on the new battlefield existing at the tip of the fingers and on nothing more than our laptops and airwaves and server rooms. The threat is very real, and it seems many governments including ours are vastly preparing for it, somewhat. Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism adviser for Presidents Bill Clinton and Bush No.43, spoke of the threat on N.P.R.’s Fresh Air program, promoting his new book Cyber War. In Clarke’s analysis, while the American government is leaving no stone unturned to protect itself and its critical defense infrastructure, there is just not enough of a priority as of right now, on the private sector; who are as vital as government related operations. Clarke’s findings as told to N.P.R.:
“A cyberattack could disable trains all over the country,” he tells Fresh Air host Terry Gross. “It could blow up pipelines. It could cause blackouts and damage electrical power grids so that the blackouts would go on for a long time. It could wipe out and confuse financial records, so that we would not know who owned what, and the financial system would be badly damaged. It could do things like disrupt traffic in urban areas by knocking out control computers. It could, in nefarious ways, do things like wipe out medical records.”
[...]
“The Pentagon is all over this,” he says. “The Pentagon has created a four-star general command called Cyber Command, which is a military organization with thousands of people in it to go to war using these [cyber]weapons. And also, Cyber Command’s job is to defend the Pentagon. Now, who’s defending us? Who’s defending those pipelines and the railroads and the banks? The Obama administration’s answer is pretty much, ‘You’re on your own,’ that Cyber Command will defend our military, Homeland Security will someday have the capability to defend the rest of the civilian government — it doesn’t today — but everybody else will have to do their own defense. That is a formula that will not work in the face of sophisticated threats.”
Listen to Clarke’s full interview (along with a book excerpt) [Here]
Chicago’s ‘Operation Ceasefire,’ A Bellwether? 11/16/2009
Posted by Vaughn in Editorial, Global, Journalism, Law and Order, Policy, Politics.comments closed
Photo Credit: SpY
THE Economist’s “The World in 2009″ — a collection of articles and thought pieces, projecting on the ideas and events to watch for in 2009 — ran an article titled “Crime, Interrupted,” profiling an innovative policing method that looks to curb the gun violence on the mean streets of America’s cities. The article’s sub-heading, beneath the lede, read: “Treating Violent Crime as a Disease.” And like another practice of medicine, that of triage E.R.-care in a desperate-for-peace central city or a battlefield — sometimes these are the same — this new method looks to focus on only the most severe cases first, while letting less serious matters hit the back-burner. (This makes tremendous sense in an economically strapped environment where local cities are operating on less than a shoestring budget, sometimes.) But this approach runs counter to the established policing practice that has dominated law enforcement philosophy for nearly 20 years.
The more recent orthodox doctrine of law enforcement, argues that petty crimes in high-crime areas, left unchecked, make for an environment conducive to more crimes of increasing magnitude. (Read: violent crime/gun crime.) It is a “Broken Windows” model; a theory that posits a broken window left unfixed in a neighborhood is a sign of blight, and sends a message that “crime is okay here.” Figuratively speaking, small crimes are “broken windows.” And so the traditional model deals with all crime, regularly enforcing even the most minor offenses and dealing with low-level offenders — like squeegee men — and it places many more officers on the streets, heightens their visibility and their rate of enforcement and deterrence. Under this method known as “zero-tolerance,” there are also local commanders designated to such high-crime areas, who are then held accountable for the crimes committed in their area, and responsible for the tracking of the crime rate in their respective zone via a spreadsheet program. (Compustat is one kind of such software, used by the New York Police Department.)
This multi-pronged approach of creating a highly visible presence and regular, routine enforcement of law violations of varying severity; creating tremendous order by focusing on petty crime, along with a consistent tracking of the crime rate of a specific area, and coupled with accountability, was developed under then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani, during his ’90s clean-up and re-branding effort of New York. And the method was implemented and executed alongside his then-Police Chief William Bratton, the now recently retired L.A.P.D. police chief. Giuliani’s and Bratton’s zero-tolerance method worked well. It turned New York into one of the safest cities in America. And because the strategy was so effective, to the point of reducing murders in N.Y.C. from 2,200 in 1990 to less than 500 in 2007, it became the template on which many cities based their policing programs on.
That method, however, was devised under the circumstances of a New York from 15 years ago, and it is a single-minded approach tailored for that city; adapting it to a one-size-fits-all program for all metropolitan areas, lacks nuance and understanding. It presumes that all things being equal, or in this case smaller (or much smaller), than the Big Apple; that such zero-tolerance policing methods would work almost anywhere. And all things were not equal, obviously, since other cities haven’t found the zero-tolerance policy nearly as effective as it was in New York, and this is due to the fact that very few cities are as densely populated or as centralized.
Most cities are much more spread out, and so many more police officers on the streets cracking-down on petty crimes is harder to notice – key to the philosophy of zero-tolerance is the impression of no crime being tolerated — and so it isn’t as effective, as well as it is harder to commit to logistically. And those who looked to repeat the zero-tolerance model in their own cities, missed an important variable in the N.Y.C. formula: the knowledgeable leadership embodied in Giuliani and Bratton. Unlike in other cities, both this mayor and this police chief, understood police culture and knew precisely how to motivate their officers using praise and fear. As a result, any cities absent similar conditions to that of New York in the early ’90s, which is most, are saddled with an ineffective policing strategy, almost two decades in the making. What is needed, then, is a new approach.
The Economist projected that in 2009, a community-assisted philosophy to policing that is the diametric opposite of zero-tolerance, would rise to prominence. The brainchild of epidemiologist, Wesley Skogan, this new method looks to curb violence directly, honing in on those most likely to kill or be killed. (The article specifically mentions candidates of such focus to be the recently released from prison, and those who are associates of persons recently wounded by gunfire. ) The strategy is a far-cry from zero-tolerance, because it does not worry or waste as many resources on trivial law enforcement matters and more importantly, this is key, it places an onus on communities most hard-hit with bloated violent-crime rates to do some of their own policing, and change their neighborhoods’ cultures from within.
In this method, communities become involved in their own struggle for safe streets through their local leaders, specifically clergy, in tandem with outreach workers who mobilize the community to directly oppose violence. At night, there is also the use of “violence interrupters” who look to find emerging trouble and stop it in its tracks. And these “violence interrupters” know the lay of the land and the nature of those streets themselves, many of them were gangbangers and former prison inmates, and present a rough-hewn approach to violent-crime from say what is expected of local city law enforcement. “Violence interrupters” may attempt to convince rival drug cartels that a street war is bad business because it is a magnet for cops, or that perhaps a man who feels he was wronged or disrespected in some way that requires death in the code of the streets, just beat a man, as oppose to kill him. Obviously, this tact takes an entirely different approach which leaves latitude for the disaster law enforcement is trying to avoid: murder. But the tact is either going to work or not, and if it fails, the result is no different from what it was going to be anyway, a violent crime. (The main hope is to remove the gun from the equation.)
This is the method that has been the basic standard operating procedure in some areas of Chicago for the last 10 years, as part of Operation Ceasefire, and despite that city’s continuing disheartening murder statistics, especially among youth, this method seems to work in the areas where it is implemented. In 2008, Chicago’s Operation Ceasefire method was audited by the Justice Department. The study yielded that in five of seven communities where the methods of Operation Ceasefire were used, shootings had decreased precipitously, and in four of the tracked areas the decline was far greater than comparable locations where the Operation Ceasefire practices were not in effect.
However, Chicago is a very unique situation, maybe as unique as New York’s was in the ’90s, since the city’s variable of a longstanding tradition of the sort of community organizing and mobilizing needed for this program, is rarely seen nationwide. Nonetheless, Chicago is an incubator for a project that has begun to spread. Cities such as Newark, Kansas City, Baltimore and even New York, with its trial program, along with 10 more according to The Economist’s Joel Budd, are adopting methods inspired-by Operation Ceasefire or implementing its exact techniques. And we will not know for some time, if they are working broadly.
Ceasefire Chicago [Here]
The Economist‘s “Crime, Interrupted” [Here]
