Q: What does Anders Breivik have to do with Marvel superheroes and hollywood blockbusters? A: Quite a lot. (Slight Avengers spoilers follow)

The last decade and a bit has consisted of two arcs: terrorism and superheroes. The world is now intimately familiar with both al-Qaeda and minor Marvel/DC intellectual property. There’s a fair bit of crossover – in the summer of 2001 I spent about a month and a half in the US, and happened to see the Spiderman trailer a month or so before 9/11 after which it was pulled for obvious reasons. A little over a decade later (two days back), I saw The Avengers, and I was slightly gobsmacked at the quantity of knowing (or unknowing) references to 9/11 in it. What struck me most about the film were the numerous Alan Moore references, which I’m sure were conscious on Joss Whedon’s part. If you don’t know who Alan Moore is, you might be familiar with the Watchmen film that was released a couple of years back (which butchered significant sections of the comic), or, visually, the iconic “Anonymous” mask is his work, from V is for Vendetta (also a great work butchered in film). In short, a recluse comic book author’s dystopian take on the concept of superheroes is now filtering through into the biggest hollywood blockbusters.

Here I’m going to make the argument that people writing about lone wolf terrorists should get a cup of tea/coffee and read up on Alan Moore. I understand that comics aren’t for everyone, even though Neil Gaiman’s Sandman is one of the best works of literature, full stop, IMHO. Moore is important because in Marvelman/Miracleman, he made the direct connection between the concept of a ‘superhero’ and Nietzsche/Nietzsche’s concept of the ‘superman’. He also made the corollary argument that rather than awe, or comedic anger, the correct societal response to such persons should be abject fear. In The Avengers, a major plot point hinges on the fact that ‘normal’ human society has no defence against superheroes. Echoing the pinnacle of Moore’s work on Marvelman, the denouement to the Avengers film references 9/11 memory walls in memory of the ordinary people killed in the crossfire when superheroes fight (there was plenty of framing dialogue about ‘containing’ the bad guys, but hey…). It wasn’t quite the climax of Moore’s work on Marvelman (in which the narrating ‘good’ protagonist admits to using a car full of innocent people as a weapon against the ‘evil’ supervillain) but the point stands – innocent people die when superheroes fight.

I think that superheroes happen to be an important way of thinking about ‘lone wolf’ terrorists such as Timothy McVeigh or Anders Breivik. A single person, capable of unleashing terrible force/changing the planet etc. Nietzsche was talking about Supermen as persons unbounded by the morality of the herd, Moore made the point that persons capable of unleashing terrible force should be an object of worry, regardless of whose side they happen to be on, and furthermore, there’s no reason to think that they might agree with ‘our’ way of thinking. Lone wolf terrorists are persons that are capable of unleashing terrible force, unbounded by the standards of a given society. In essence, they’re one part Nietzsche, one part Moore – dangerous and worrying despite lacking the funky Ironman suit or hammer of Thor.

Terrorism studies tends to situate itself in the level of organisations: networks of terrorists versus the state. More important, I think, is the relationship between the individual and the collective. This is one of the ‘deep’ questions of political philosophy. Reading Hobbes and Locke etc, one of the clear assumptions is that the balance of power is fundamentally stacked against the individual, at the most brute level, individuals might be able to use force, but in the face of the collective, or state, they are powerless, hence the need for rights, and arguments regarding the authority of sovereigns (the embodiment of the collective). There are challenges to this, in the form of assassins and first wave anarchists, but in reality, the state system is a giant boot, and individuals are ants. When the gloves ‘come off’, states can do terrible, terrible things to a person. The narrative of the lone individual against such a bureaucracy (see 1984, A Brave New World et al) is powerful for this reason. But what happens when this fundamental relationship is altered?

What is important about lone wolf terrorists, and, for similar reasons, movements such as anonymous, is that we’re sliding towards a world of ‘supermen’, and it’s not a pretty sight. The “Don’t tread on me” idea is relatively harmless when espoused by half baked survivalists defending bunkers in the Adirondack mountains against the IRS, but not so great when a single dissenting voice can shut down planet-wide infrastructure (see Paypal, Visa), or kill a significant amount of people (see McVeigh, Breivik). What happens when these individuals or small groups start going to war? There have been nods towards this in the real world (remember the Anonymous ‘vs’ the Mexican cartels hoax a while back?) but the worst is yet to come. What happens when Anonymous pisses off some criminal black hat hackers? What if another Breivik provokes a violent response from a similar type on the ‘other side’? In either case, lots of innocent people are going to get caught in the crossfire (admittedly, the Anonymous thing likely wouldn’t end in physical violence). The fundamental point of these people is that a single person with sufficient motivations can develop the skills to perform an act (likely one time, but there’s the Unabomber to think about) which horrifies the majority, and there’s little that our existing governmental architecture can do to prevent this.

What does the world, let alone a democracy, look like when a single dissenting voice, or small group of voices, can override (not simply be protected from) the will of the majority? If there’s one aspect of this that I’m certain of, it would have little to do with the existing literature on freedom and liberty, regardless of hue, be it Paine, Godwin or Marx. At the moment, democracy/society works by protecting individuals from the majority, but by exluding minority positions (see anarcho-primitivism as much as white power thugs) that most people disagree with. The whole ‘Occupy’ consensual decision making is fine, when working within a shared framework of people that want to talk to one another, but where would common ground be found in a discussion between UKIP and the left-er sections of the Labour party? The simple answer is that it wouldn’t – if fifty million people had a veto, the country would stop working. What worries me most about Breivik and Anonymous isn’t their particular ideology or goals, but what they represent – the forceful veto of the individual on the collective outside the democratic process.

This week’s furor about Peter Cruddas, co-treasurer of the Conservative Party, offering the opportunity to suggest policies in exchange for cash is unlikely to die down for quite some time.

But I’d like to play devil’s advocate for a moment and propose a (possibly slightly far fetched) counterpoint: why shouldn’t we let parties accept policy suggestions in exchange for donations?

We live in a democracy, in which politicans secure power through means of a popular vote, a vote which depends on the government’s ability to deliver what the people want. If they deliver it, they stay in place. If they don’t, they get voted out.

Let’s imagine for a minute an alternate history in the Cruddas Saga, in which three imaginary things had occured:
1. The newspaper representatives had genuinely been potential donors.
2. That Peter Cruddas did indeed have the power to arrange donor input into Tory policy committees.
3. That the donors had signed up and then provided an idea to the policy committees to consider.

If the idea put forward  had been discriminatory, partisan or simply self-serving, then the Tory party would have been nuts to pick it up: their existence in power relies on winning elections, and to do that you need popular support. Advancing an unpopular policy is a sure way to lose support. If however, in a fit of madness, the Tories had decided to accept the bad idea and run with it, then the system’s safety net would have kicked into gear - the policy would have reduced their popularity and decreased their chances of being re-elected. Alternatively, if the idea had been a good or selfless one that resonated with the people, then fine - the people’s will would still have been served (and we got the good advice for free no less!).

Of course, the obvious rebuttal is to argue that the added money provided by political donors would allow a party to mask or gloss its actions through publicity and – dare I say it - propaganda. But this represents an overly pessimistic view. Positive marketing can only go so far – if I’m waiting on a station for a train and it’s running late, it doesn’t matter how many adverts the rail provider plays about their high quality services, I’m still stuck fuming on a station and I’m going to be hacked off.

For those who aren’t yet convinced, consider this – America pumped billions of dollars into supporting Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime in China between 1945 and 1949. But no matter how much money they spent, they were never able to persuade the Chinese public that the regime was not corrupt; that inflation was not rife; that the party was not going to lose the war; and that generally the country was going in the right direction. Money given directly to a ruling party does not guarantee popularity amongst its people.

The model that scares me more is the one where donors offer money directly to the public in exchange for votes (“Vote for my candidate, and I’ll build your community an ice rink. Vote for the other candidate and you’ll get nothing”).

We saw an international relations versus of this in the 2000 when the West offered up the Serbian people a deal: Vote Slobodan Milosevic out and we’ll lift our economic sanctions. Vote him in again, and we’ll keep on squeezing you until the pips squeak. The Serbs promptly voted Milosevic out (okay, there were other reasons too – but the economic…’incentive’…certainly helped!).

So, no, I’m not really afraid of donors being allowed to suggest ideas to party policy committees in exchange for money – any party that follows a policy of accepting and running with ideas that fail to serve the wider country will quickly find themselves voted out of power. The very institution of democracy protects us.

I’ll start worrying instead when the donors turn their attention to us and start offering us cash or other incentives in exchange for our votes directly.

Mohammed Merah, the culprit of the killing of 7 people in France last week, was found using a mix of traditional and online forensics. This case highlights that online attribution/identification is possible with a sound Internet governance model, but it also raises a few questions.

On Sunday 11 March, a military official, Imad Ibn Ziaten, was killed in Toulouse. Four days later, on Thursday 15 March, two other military officials were killed following a similar method (one man on a black motorbike and the same calibre of weapon).

By Friday, the police suspected that Imad Ibn Ziaten was lured into a trap after Merah responded to Ziaten’s advertisement on the French website LeBonCoin.fr to sell his motorbike.

Obtaining the IP addresses

With a court order (réquisition judiciaire), eight policemen from the OCLCTIC (central office against cyber criminality) requested LeBonCoin.fr to give them all the IP addresses that visited the ads for the motorbike. By Friday, LeBonCoin had complied and provided the police with the 576 IP addresses that had visited the website. Any web intermediaries are required to keep this information for a year under a law from 1 March 2011 (following the EU data directive  2006/24/EC). This was facilitated by the fact that LeBonCoin was hosting its services in France (more on that below).

From this, we can deduct that the police didn’t have access either to Ziaten’s computer, or to his e-mail account, as opposed to what The Telegraph previously stated. This would have greatly facilitated their work as e-mails must have been exchanged between Ziaten and his killer for the sale of his motorbike.

From the IPs to the ISPs to the names

The same law mentioned above (enacted for the fight against terrorism, NOR: JUSD0805748D) also requires Internet Service Providers (ISP) to keep trace of IP allocations to users (generally referred to as call detail records).

Regional Internet Registries (part of IANA) allocate IP addresses to autonomous systems. In Europe, the Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC) is the one responsible for this task. By using their database query, anyone can link an IP address to an Internet service provider. As a consequence, the police did not have to contact every service providers available in France to know if they had allocated a specific IP address. This can be quite practical, as RIPE lists 760 local Internet registries capable of providing IP addresses in France. (This is just an assumption – the police might have as well just given the whole bunch of IP addresses to the eight largest French service providers and ‘hoped for the best’).

Once the the service providers answered, the police was able to identify the names behind the IP addresses and cross check them with their list of suspects. Zoulikha Aziri, Merah’s mother’s name, happened to be on the suspect list. They had identified the lead by Sunday but didn’t manage to make a formal connection between Ziaten (the first victim) and Merah before Tuesday 20 March, one day after a third series of shooting killing four other people.

Positive lessons

At least two positive lessons about the impact of Internet governance on attribution can be highlighted with this case: one concerns data retention and the other country code top-level domain sound practices.

Data retention always receives its fair share of criticisms from freedom of speech and privacy advocates. In France, the law for data retention was adopted primarily against a backdrop of increasing surveillance justified by the fear of terrorism. Yet, this case proves that data retention can be effective and is not used only in shady  non-public cases by intelligence services. As putting the data all together to identify a specific individual is resource intensive (200 policemen involved at the highest peak for 7 millions of telecommunication data checked), keeping call details record may not constitute a breach of privacy as important as feared by its opponents. The police were also lucky enough that 1) the service providers answered quickly and were located within the French jurisdiction 2) the criminal was not behind a NAT-type network 3) the criminal was not using any anonymisation services (IP spoofing, proxy, onion routing, etc.).

Had eBay, or any other non-French based company website been used for the ad, would the same procedure have been possible? The law for call detail records does not specify a restriction for services hosted outside France and could have also been applied with signatory countries of mutual legal assistance treaties with France. On top of that, there exists a clause requiring any websites that register for a ‘dot fr’ to possess an address in France in case legal proceedings must take place (art. 5 of the Afnic’s charter). Hence, a similar but more lengthy and tedious process could have been followed to retrieve such data. But only because existing mechanisms ensure that attribution is not only left to ‘good luck’.

Question

Yet, instead of having to sieve through 576 IP addresses, the police could have just retrieved the IP address from the header of the e-mail setting up the place and time for the selling of the motorbike. This would have required only a court order to access Ziaten’s computer and not much more bureaucracy.

Why didn’t this happen? It would have permitted the identification of the IP address straight away (providing that the e-mail was stored on the computer or on a server located in France) and would have also formalised the link between Ziaten and Merah, allowing the police to act on time before the third killing took place.

Anonymous are not activists. Their actions are not political. And yet, as they continue to deface websites and leak documents, the media keeps referring to them as such. As members of the group are being arrested in the US, UK and Ireland, it’s time to revisit the myth.

‘Political participation may be defined as individual or collective action at the national or local level that supports or opposes state structures, authorities, and/or decisions regarding allocation of public goods’ (Barness et. al., 1988)

Some of Anonymous’ actions don’t fit that definition, and are instead very much closer to opportunism.

Yesterday, Anonymous defaced Panda Security for allegedly helping law enforcement agencies to arrest them. According to the BBC, this is activism. But it failed to mention what they considered as political in this action. If it opposes authority, this is clearly in a self-centric manner, not oriented towards the greater good of the community.

A week before that, WikiLeaks published e-mails obtained from the security group Stratfor. The ‘activist’ group Anonymous was credited for obtaining the information. What was the political argument behind it? Was it that governments shouldn’t subcontract intelligence analysis? Or was it that governments shouldn’t engage in intelligence analysis at all? No members of Anonymous backed the action with any political comment. Instead they said in a video: ‘’the security firm failed to encrypt its client information making vulnerable to theft’. So, I can only guess in the end, that they hoped for the public to accredit them with whatever argument political commentators will likely come up with.

Even Anonymous’ argument is paradoxical in their approach. They advocate complete transparency, and that evil governments shouldn’t keep any information from the public eyes (hence Stratfor’s hack). They advocate that information is free (hence Sony’s hack in 2010 and 2012). They advocate basically that privacy and confidentiality shouldn’t exist anymore and that we should all share our data with everyone as much as Anonymous does.

Yet, when other groups, such as The Sun, used the same technics as they do to impinge on confidentiality, they are also unhappy with it. They then seized another occasion to seek for fame and be called ‘hacktivist’ by hacking into The Sun website. Their actions are inconsistent and not clear because, once more, they didn’t explain them and lazily let the public find the ‘political’ argument that will explain their paradoxical and childish opportunistic behaviour.

The anonymity of the groups not only hampers on their political accountability but also blurs any of their messages, as one cannot judge their motives. In other words, they lack transparency as much as their targets allegedly do.

So, in the end, one should be careful about not giving too much credit for such actions. Anonymous sometimes seeks to achieve more personal fame and maybe the media shouldn’t give in to that. Recently, Cyberwarnews.com released an interview of a hacker that allegedly defaced ’80 Brazilian Government sites’. Hacktivism, again? The hacker was 13 (this should already cast a doubt about his political judgement). When asked about his motives for hacking, he answered: ‘I hack to take part in the latest operations and to get better at hacking’. How can we know that Anonymous has not got exactly the same strong sense of political action to help the larger community?

Jason Russell has an idea, and that idea is to arrest Joseph Kony. Jason has made a movie to explain how he is putting his idea in motion: crowdsourcing military intervention. Well, he doesn’t quite phrase it in that way, but that is what it amounts to. Armed with #KONY2012 hashtags, posters, bracelets and viral movie clips, Russell aims to make Joseph Kony public enemy number one (on a global level). As the name of a warlord from the middle of the African continent is now the top-trending topic on Twitter, I’d say he’s off to a pretty good start.

Let’s make no bones about this, Russell is pretty much on the money about the nature of Kony. If such things still existed, he’d be a prime example of hostis humani generis. But if this works, then the world gets a little bit more dangerous.

Russell’s film is hopeful (it even has the Obama ‘Hope’ guy in a fraction of the film). It presents a pretty simple and powerful idea: we identify a prime candidate for global public enemy number one, we get his name to the entire world with viral marketing and then leverage that to get policymakers to go after him. We the people speak, they the administrators listen and Kony gets handcuffed and dragged before the International Criminal Court. Russell even goes into the nuts and bolts of it – America needs to give the Ugandans the equipment/advisors to track him down.

To re-visit the “Underpants Gnome” model of foreign policy:

1) Give Uganda things.

2) …

3) Get arrest.

While this is in no way a criticism of the choice of Kony, here’s my problems with the above setup:

As the film indicates, the Lord’s Resistance Army operates in a pretty big swathe of Central Africa. Kony is pretty decent at manouvering between borders. It has kept him alive for the past couple of decades, so on a planning position, let’s take it is a given that he will carry on doing this. The LRA is currently operating somewhere between the Central African Republic, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Combined with Uganda, those four states have him penned in. The problem being, pressure in one will lead to him skipping across the border into another. Unless Kony 2012 want state militaries to start walking across borders after him, that’s four pretty weak state governments that need to be considered. How much will their armed forces cost to bring up to scratch? The alternative might be to arm one, and let them play Texas ranger across the borders of three other sovereign states. I’m not using sovereignty here as a barrier, but it’s something to consider. Helpfully, the video excludes the fact that Uganda helped invade the DRC in the 1990s, DRC politicians are currently under indictment for war crimes committed in the CAR and when Uganda went into South Sudan to chase Kony, their own troops were accused of killing and kidnapping South Sudanese civilians. I’m no Africa specialist, but that sounds like a disaster in the making if one of them is going to be given carte blanche to go after Kony, if such a thing is possible.

Second problem: let’s assume that somehow, a government, or collection of governments, is armed and trained, and sent off after Kony.  The immediate question is whether he is captured or killed. Might not be too tasteful if millions of youtube viewers worldwide wake up to the fact that they are directly responsible for the decision to go after a man, that gets him killed. I wouldn’t shed a tear over kony’s death, but it is worth considering. The second consideration is what happens afterwards. Will the armies involved give all those cool new toys that America has provided back? I think not. If America is induced to conduct a mass technology transfer, we wind up with 1-4 newly empowered state militaries. At least, technically state militaries. Lest we forget (or the helpful film casually ignores) the relationship between soldier and state isn’t the same in those four countries as westerners expect it to be. Have Kony 2012 put any thought into what the knock-on effects of the mass empowerment of these military forces might do? You only have to look at the role of the military in South Sudan’s internal conflicts to know that putting better guns and equipment in the state’s hand might have unforseen, lethal, consequences for the citizens that have to put up with the state long after Kony stops trending on twitter.

Third, and perhaps most important: Crowdsourcing intervention. Russell has picked an easy target: Joseph Kony. Why stop there? More to the point, if this works, will it ever stop? Will simplistic explanations of long-running wars, delivered in a Facebook-friendly manner become the future of foreign policy? If the opinion of Rihanna and George Clooney is going to dislodge ‘technocrats’ who do things like read the Military Balance, then what’s to stop intervention in Syria? Pretty much everyone with a passing interest in military affairs says “that is a very bad idea and lots of people will die” but I’m pretty sure that a bright person with access to youtube can come up with a better argument for a brighter world in which taking Assad down is an expression of democratic empowerment. The point about war and military affairs is that at some point, it requires restraint. That restraint is entirely arbitrary (and unfair) but it stops people getting killed. If Angelina Jolie in combination with Condoleeza Rice are to dictate American strategy, then restraints to force will disappear into a blur of “Let’s go get the bad guy” activism that is almost entirely ignorant of the second and third order effects of those decisions.

To finish: Joseph Kony deserves to be put in cuffs and dragged before the ICC. Raising the profile of the heinous nature of the guy’s crimes is awesome. The idea that popular opinion can be leveraged with viral marketing to induce foreign military intervention is really, really dangerous. It is immoral to try and sell a sanitised vision of foreign intervention that neglects the fact that people will die as a result. That goes for politicians as much as for Jason Russell.

Edit – For a continuation of this article that goes into a bit more depth on military questions, click here. Jack

Cyberwar.  Is it?  Isn’t it?  What a palarva!  Not since Mary Kaldor’s ‘New Wars/Old Wars’ have we seen such a fuss…[Okay, the fuss over this is not anywhere near as big or as wide ranging as that, but it might get there one day...besides, we need to sell this, man!  Bigger, better, more controversial...the sky is the limit!]

What I find interesting about this topic is that, while new funky thinking may be required, a lot of the discussion is really going through the same steps that we have gone through in relation to conventional war.  Maybe that thinking is wrongly applied, but it is certainly the case that it is happening.  The similarities are apparently everywhere: Mahan’s sea power thinking (think: need to control the medium to ensure effective communications); Fuller’s Plan 1919 (think: strike at the nerve centre or brain, rather than hacking off the limbs); Douhet’s air power theory (think: the malware will always get through).  Some think that cyber is the technological break through that will allow these ideas to finally come into their own.

For a more tactical example, in the armies of the West in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was a long evolution in thinking about weapons.  The focus was traditionally on the characteristics of a weapon, learning how to place it, etc. (A machine gun goes on the flank, fires at its optimum range, etc.)  Then the thinking changed a bit, and focused more on ‘weapons effects’ (Don’t worry about where the MG goes, where do you want the bullets to fall?  Then place the weapon to create the desired effect–kill the enemy, discourage him for going in one direction, strip personnel from their vehicles, etc.)  Subtle, but the changes altered the way one looked at things, changed the doctrine, force models, etc. 

We then went even further, and started talking about capabilities.  Militaries changed from platform-centric planning to capability/delivery-based planning.  If you want a hostile compound neutralised at Grid 123456 don’t be limited in your imagination and think, ‘Hey, I need a 155mm artillery strike.’  Why should you care what platform is involved?  Maybe the same effect can be delivered by a close air support aircraft, or a drone, or a space-based laser.  Now we see people (like the former director of the CIA) making similar observations, as they come to grips with what they believe to be cyberwar.

So, is cyberwar susceptible to the same kind of thinking?  Will we see the same evolution of thought?  Will any of it be valid, or just analogical but irrelevant? 

This is my wonder about cyber things.  Thomas Rid, of this here ‘blog, has said that cyber war is not war because it lacks the necessary definitional elements, which he claims to be violence, instrumentality, and political purpose.  But isn’t that kind of like saying that academics don’t work, because the physical definition of work is mass x distance?  Certainly writing a paper feels like work, we get paid like its work, it can even have an effect like work (starts a new line of thinking, or even creates a new product, etc.) [Please, spare me the comments...you get the idea].

Along the line of thought, maybe cyber war is war, it is just that our old definition is wrong, or no longer adequate to accommodate the current reality?  After all, we now consider people communicating via an internet connection to be able to constitute a real community, turning the older definitions of community (based on kinship or physical propinquity) on their heads. 

Let’s assume that Rid is correct: cyber war is not old war.  But does that mean that it is not–or that it could not ever become–a new kind of war?

Will cyber ever by a pure-play war in and of itself?  Here, I would agree with Rid.  We are unlikely to see a fully and wholly cyber war.

But, I, personally, think that cyber could be old war, or more precisely, a component of old warfare.  It can represent force (if not actual violence against people, it could sabotage something, like a nuclear plant, or disable a key defence, like a air defence coordination system), that if applied correctly, could create a specific effect (either on the physical plane or on the cognitive plane of an enemy or a civilian population), ultimately creating or contributing to a desired change in behaviour (surrender, bowing to our will, etc.)  In that way, it can create effects, which can be instrumental, and which can be political in intent and in impact.

In this way, cyber should at least be as warlike as advertising (propaganda), psychology (information operations), electronics (radar or radio jamming), or any other ‘dual use technology’. 

Or am I missing something?

Still fanning the flames?

Chances are that you, Dear Reader, are a student of international affairs, that you aspire to be one, that you occasionally read academic journals. And you, I’m sure, will occasionally have wondered, How many people actually read that stuff?

You just got an answer to your question, it seems.

Taylor & Francis, the academic publishing empire, has made the download statistics for journal articles available. T&F publishes more than 1,ooo journals, among them several leading international affairs and security studies journals, including The Journal of Strategic Studies, Security Studies, Survival, The RUSI Journal, and Terrorism and Political Violence.

You can now find the download numbers for individual articles under “most read,” then “Citations,“* but I think only for those articles that are listed there.

Here’s what it adds up to in our field (click to enlarge): 

A few caveats. First, downloads don’t reflect actual readers. People may download several versions from different machines and then not read them. Second, downloads don’t refect academic impact. Citations continue to be a more important measure. Third, the stats are probably biased. The RUSI Journal readership, for instance, is understated because content is available elsewhere as well, although the majority of readers get content from T&F, the editors tell me. Fourth, we don’t know when T&F started counting (and they won’t give this information out, as it is covered by confidentiality agreements with the proprietors of the journals, their marketing team told us). Finally some articles are overrated by downloads: for instance a recent article by your blogger, “Cyber War Will Not Take Place,” was downloaded so many times that on its own, it would outrank all combined top-ten downloads of all individual journals on the list — obviously such a disproportional amount of attention cannot be deserved: perhaps it says more about hype and the quality of the cyber security debate than about the article itself; the article is also not behind a paywall and available for free.

So what does all this mean?

Several things. One is that you can now compare. Between journals, at least between T&F’s periodicals, but also to other outlets. And of course we at KoW could not resist comparing the stats to our own page views. And here’s what that means: blogs matter for academics.

It’s been a while that some of us have contributed on these pages. The workload is cruel. Blog posts have a short shelf-life. And do my colleagues — those on the relevant committees — really read an academic blog with a funny name? In fact just last week I considered calling it a day and stopping blogging altogether. But, well, have a look at that grey bar in the graph. The numbers pretty much speak for themselves. Yes, it’s a blog, it’s free, it’s shorter, it’s crisper, and we’re comparing apples and oranges. But still: note, again, that we don’t know when T&F started counting, but if they started two or even one year ago, then most of KoW’s accumulated views are more recent (and the blog’s stats don’t even include views by more than 1,700 RSS-feed-subscribers).

T&F’s logo once played on academic publishing’s function of fueling debates. The flames, some will no doubt conclude, are increasingly fanned by specialized blogs, not by obscure journals behind a pay-wall. But be careful. I wouldn’t draw this conclusion that quickly. Flaming yes, but the quality-debate is mostly still happening in serious journals. That is unlikely to change any time soon.

Yet one thing is certain: if you’re a scholar, blogging can be a win-win: you’re doing a public service, contributing to the wider debate, getting more eyeballs to read your article, and you’d be boosting the broader impact of scholarship.

* UPDATE: T&F, for unknown reasons, has stopped publishing these statistics for all its journals a few days after this post was out (probably no relation). Therefore I’m linking to my PDF printout of the stats.

Yesterday, Jack McDonald and I from Kings of War visited the British Army’s Force Development and Training Command for a show and tell about their vision and work to date for the Army in the post-Afghanistan and post-Iraq World. This event was aimed in part to demonstrate how the Army has been working to address the concerns raised during the run up to the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review about the Army’s failure to innovate and think. 

I’m writing this post separately to Jack, as we both took different things away from the day, and so a point by point comparison would be fairly…pointless? (cue sound of two elephants falling off the edge of a cliff). Instead, I’m going to zero in on what struck me on the day, which is mainly that I thought things seem very hopeful. While realities are often hard to achieve, the Army is beginning to develop a vision – and a belief in that vision – of how it can improve over  the coming years. So, here is a short list of the things that struck me as promising:

-> The process is being spearheaded by a dynamic and intelligent group of senior and mid-level army commanders - particularly Lieutenant General Paul Newton – who are prepared to challenge establishment thinking and really push the upper echelons of on some of the most important issues facing the British Army today. This is undoubtedly a good thing.

-> They are attempting to drive forward methods of internal learning, and find practical, workable ways of managing these process. For example, promoting post-operations briefings that bring together forces on the ground with other key players such as equipment designers and doctrine writers. Imagine a scenario in which an infantry commander who wears a flak jacket on patrol can feedback directly to the jacket designer that the item felt too cumbersome or didn’t provide enough protection. This is shockingly sensible stuff! Similarly, the Army is developing an evaluation process during which its members are asked to talk back through elements of an action, including the original objectives, a step by step description of what actually happened, if they were aware of other things going on around them, whether or not they felt they achieved their goals, and what future adjustments they would recommend, all accompanied by state-of-the-art analytical tools. Evaluation is more my wife’s topic than mine, but from what little I’ve gleaned from her, this sounds like a good quality process that rivals what we are trying to do in mainstream civilian institutions.

-> They are searching for and drilling into the issues that matter. For example, they have identified that just 5 to 20 percent of shots have been hitting the target during live fire tactical training, a stunningly low figure. They have identified why this occurs (firing training is often viewed as box ticking exercise) and why it matters (COIN campaigns require precision shooting to ensure we accurately hit the targets we want to and avoid collateral damage against non-combatants). They have even thrown a little history into the mix: drawing a fascinating parallel between the recognition of low small arms expertise during the Boer War, the subsequent focus on firing training afterwards, and the high quality of the British Expeditionary Force in 1914.

-> They want to invest more in people, not in terms of money or numbers, but rather by helping their officers to develop improved intellectual capacity, so that they can contribute more original thinking, critique established ideas and generally pursue a more informed approach in their work. Possibilities included seeking to engage potential recruits better at the university level, offering more higher education opportunities earlier (and potentially linking these to promotion, as per equivalent civilian industries) and supporting – rather than impeding – officers with undertaking PhDs.

-> Finally, they are reaching out to academics for input, commentary and feedback. And these are not limited to the same old people, with whom they have built up established – and possibly overly comfortable relationships – but are instead to fresh commentators (the invitation of authors from Kings of War is a case in point). At the end of the day the entire group was told to talk or write about the event as much as we wished and to be as critical as we wanted, even though the day itself had been splendidly frank and candid.

Now, my glowing comments thus far might suggest that I have been brought off by a free lunch and some coffees, which is of course not remotely true (although I must say that their sandwiches were stellar and their biscuit range impressive). It’s more that I honestly believe that they are going in the right direction. We have here a group of senior staff who are seriously critiquing the army and challenging establishment norms. This is no mean feat. The Lieutenant General told us that one of the very first questions he has to answer is: ‘Why?’ I am very happy that it is him, not me sitting with the Army’s leadership and having to answer that particular question!

I do have some concerns, most notably that while the Army is attempting to learn backwards from its recent experiences to prepare itself for the future, including through improving their capacity for fighting hybrid conflicts and conducting urban warfare campaigns, they aren’t really connecting with the forward looking, blue sky thinking that they need to in order to really cover their bases.

I queried the Lieutenant General on this, and was told that that they are not attempting to undertake revolutionary new changes, but instead “reclaiming the right for the army to think for itself” and conducting “a rectification of absurdity”.

Admirable goals both. But this still doesn’t quite answer how the above changes will be useful if the threat we face turns out to be one that we don’t expect. And it is here, for me, that the army really needs to stop and think: How do we prepare for threats that we don’t yet know about? How do we avoid training our forces for one type of campaign (e.g. an urban focused ‘war amongst the people’) that ends up being an entirely different one (e.g. a war away from the people in the arctic)? Looking backwards is a good way to avoid repeating mistakes, but as the French have so learned so dearly, preparing for the wars of the past doesn’t necessarily mean being ready for the wars of the future (see Grandstander’s post towards the end).

Furthermore, How do we ensure that we don’t abandon our conventional methods in such great measure that in the event of a major new conventional war we are left totally unprepared? This isn’t quite as infeasible as it sounds. During the 1920s and the 1930s the British failed to focus on developing tank warfare because we believed our future wars would be fought in the colonies, not mainland Europe. Hitler proved us staggeringly wrong.

On top of all of the other work we do, we need to ensure that at the most basic level we don’t make this mistake again. You can lose a COIN war and survive intact – albeit painfully – you can’t lose a world war and do the same.

天河一号

Yesterday a cyber tussle in Israel has again made news, and The New York Times promptly screamed “cyber war.”

So with perfect timing, the Department of War Studies is hosting a talk on “Cyber Arms Limitations.” As a bonus incentive, the speaker is Qichao Zhu, a Chinese guest at King’s College right now and otherwise the deputy director of the Center for National Security and Strategic Studies (CNSSS) at the National University of Defense Technology in Changsha, Hunan Province. That’s right — these are guys known for Tianhe-I, until June last year the world’s fastest computer. So when Qichao says cyber weapon, he means it.

Location Strand, War Studies Seminar Room, 6th floor, and that’s tomorrow, 18/01/2012 (16:00-18:00). First come first serve. Chair is John Gearson, director of our Centre for Defence Studies.

Abstract: With the development and proliferation of ICT in recent years, governments, international organizations and private sectors have invested a lot of strategic, tactical and technological concerns on cyber security issues world widely. How to define and differentiate cyber crime and cyber war? How to understand cyber war escalation and de-escalation? Why the western countries always criticize China on cyber espionage cases and look on China as a potential rival on future cyber conflicts? What are the obstacles and difficulties on international cyber arms limitation? Dr. Zhu tries to give some Chinese perspectives on these questions and deliver some recommendations to international cyber security cooperation.

So this evening, I was reading through the Intelligence and Security Committee’s Annual Report 2010–2011 (you know, just casually). As I delved inside, I became particularly intrigued by the sheer number of agencies who were tasked with protecting the UK from cyber attack, or at least some particular portion of it.

Now I’m no cyber guru, but it seemed to me baffling that we could have created such a uniquely complicated tangle of overlapping authorities spread across a whopping 18 (!) different agencies (nominally headed by the Cabinet Office):

It would seem that I am not alone either.

Of course, this is slightly old news, but the government’s response to the issue is definitely not. It appears now that government has begun to attempt to unravel this convoluted web (sorry for such a terrible pun!) of agencies through the establishment of a new, centralised (at least partially) cyber security hub (full report here), which it announced in November.

My knowledge of this topic area is very limited, but I was interested to know from some of the cyber aficionados (and others too) as to their thoughts on these issues:

- Is it right for multiple agencies be employed across the private and public sector to formally help protect the UK from cyber attacks? It seems that, done right, this could lead to an synergistic, mutually supportive system whereby the different agencies provide interlocking safety nets that stop threats more effectively than a single brittle barrier. But done wrong, it could be a chaotic shambles where no one really takes overall responsibility, coordination breaks down and massive gaping gaps are left open for cyber attackers to exploit.

- Is the government right to try to scoop it all up under the jurisdiction of one centralised centre? This seems like a good idea on the surface, but will having one central agency like this ultimately lead to bureaucratic inefficiency? In fact, is this even really viable as an idea, or will the other entities – particularly within the private sector - continue to flourish at such a rate that the centre will quickly become all but obsolescent?

Any thoughts?