COIN Down The Gravity Well

"The measure of an insurgency's gravity well is its drawing power: its gravity. This takes two forms. It's the form of the people under the threat of insurgents at the end of the day, as Kilcullen noted when he said that insurgents won when, "the Sun goes down and the insurgents show up saying, 'If you’re not on our side, we’re going to kill you.'"

The other form is when people who are not under threat of the insurgents are drawn to them, because they think the insurgents are the wave of the future, or the forces of right. These people don't have to join the insurgency out of fear. They do it willingly, because they want to fight America.

The measure of the gravity of an insurgency is those two things added together. We want to reduce that gravity.

So, we want to do two things.

1) We want to lessen the mass of the yellow-red "star," and therefore decrease the size and power of its gravity well.

2) We want to pull the green and blue objects away from it.

How do you do it?

Goal One:

The first goal is the province of military and clandestine/covert intelligence operations. You have to build intelligence on where the insurgents are, who they're dealing with, and so forth. The clearest model here is how we captured Saddam. Our military engagement allowed us to start gathering intelligence. We put every scrap of intelligence into a database, not just on what we knew, but on how people we encountered were related to each other. We were building a map of the gravity well.

Once we had the map, we found Saddam. He was, you might say, right at the center of it.

Where we engage the enemy directly, whether with military or civilian intelligence forces, this is the method. You map the insurgency with databases of this kind. Once you begin to have a clear picture, you start breaking up the mass. Killing and capturing yellow/red nodes is part of this.

But it's not the only part. Yellow nodes are easily replaced with red ones; red ones can be replaced with blue ones. More important than killing the members is breaking its myths. Organizations like this are built on stories: powerful stories, that everyone around it believes. Stories like, "America is weak and decadent, and the faith of the pure will defeat her Marines." Break those stories, and you radically decrease the mass of the insurgent star.

Do that, and its pull becomes weaker. It gets smaller, it weakens, it starts to die away.

Goal Two:

If an object is in the gravity well of a star or a planet, you can pull it away. You just need an object with a much deeper gravity well. You need a competitor.

Imagine if we had a star a whole lot bigger than the sun, a lot denser. We can pick it up and move it around. Let's say we set it down on the mattress, right by our solar system, so that it sank in deep.

What would happen is that all the objects currently in orbit around the sun would begin to drift in its direction. They would start rolling that way. If our huge star was big enough, and close enough, it would even tear off the outer layers of the sun.

There are many places in the world where our enemies might go for shelter, and try to set up new networks. In those places, we need to build opposing, competing gravity wells.

What would these look like? Probably they would already exist, and therefore have an in-built legitimacy. They would be Muslim organizations for the most part, because the insurgency is so heavily committed to Islam. They would be able to reach out to the networks of young men who might otherwise be drawn into terrorism.

Maybe they would look like the Nahdlatul Ulama.

The NU is a gigantic Muslim organization in Indonesia. It has fully forty million members. While it is religiously conservative, and therefore able to speak to the deeply religious Muslims that might be drawn into al Qaeda or Jemmah Islamiyah, it is not hateful. It even has a paramilitary organization, the Banser, that defends Christian churches on Christmas Day, and at other times they seem in danger of attack by radicals." [ Blackfive just got added to the classics. RTWT. And where do you think the Dems come out re breaking Islamist myth building? I know what I think... -ed. ]