Global Trends - National Intelligence Council

The NIC is crowd sourcing the next Global Trends report.  Everyone has the opportunity to comment at this link: https://nicglobaltrends.tumblr.com/submit-a-post

Some important concepts here:

• The public will have the opportunity to comment on the NIC’s “first look” and refined language through August.

In addition to analytic crowdsourcing, other important shifts in our methodology and research design include:

• Building up from the regions to identify global trends and uncertainties, rather than starting from the global level and moving to the local;

• Assessing the future at five- and 20-years. We intend the five-year horizon to increase the decisionmaking relevance of Global Trends for individuals, organizations, and governments, while the 20-year horizon preserves the strategic perspective that is the hallmark of the Global Trends series.  

Here are a few of the questions I would like to see the Global Trends address:

What will the phenomena revolution, resistance, and insurgency look like in 30 years?

What will political violence look like?

What is the future of governance structures?

Will we still be supporting and defending our current Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic in 20-30years?

Will we evolve beyond the Westphalian nation state construct?  How will sovereignty be viewed?  Will their be new forms of "sovereignty" e.g., can multi-national corporations evolve to become sovereign?  

Can sovereignty exist within cyberspace?

Will statesmen be asking upon what kind of war are we about to embark?  What will that war look like?

What will the concepts of offense, defense, stability operations as well as sabotage and subversion look like?

What will be the major narratives of states and non-state actors?

What kind of population and resources control measures will be emplace to control larger populations and declining resources?

HTTPS://NICGLOBALTRENDS.TUMBLR.COM/POST/141610120692/WITH-EVERY-GLOBAL-TRENDS-THE-NATIONAL
MAR 24, 2016

With every Global Trends, the National Intelligence Council (NIC) seeks to innovate its approach, leverage rigorous foresight methods, and expand and diversify the perspectives it consults.  We continue in that tradition for the sixth Global Trends, to be released in December, by introducing several new elements to our analytic process, including public crowdsourcing and discussion via social media platforms like Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook.  We treat crowdsourced perspectives as analytic leads to investigate and that we may integrate with findings from traditional forms of unclassified research and engagement—such as meetings with interlocutors, conferences, published research, contracted studies, public presentations, and paid consultations.   When arranged in advance, we provide compensation for some of these services.  We seek to maximally diversify the range of viewpoints consulted, attempting to balance the elite perspectives we typically consult worldwide with societal perspectives across genders and age, class, cultural, and other groups in urban and rural areas.  Such public engagement is one way the NIC and its parent organization, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, demonstrate commitment to transparency and strategic insight.  

• We experimented in 2015 with analytic crowdsourcing in conjunction with our Global Trends “core conversation” at the South by Southwest Interactive festival, garnering hundreds of thoughts from SX participants and Twitter followers as well several million views of the NIC’s “future of” vignettes on on Tumblr and Twitter.  

• In mid-March 2016, we returned to SXSW and posted on Tumblr a first look at our findings, resulting in more than 10 million views of our content across social media platforms and hundreds of insights and several longer essays shared on these pages.  

• For instance, SXSW and Twitter commentators challenged the NIC to strike the term “non-state actor” from its lexicon, in an effort to get the NIC to stop “seeing like a state” and to envision how individuals and organizations might shape the future of economics, politics, security, and geopolitics.  Others have suggested the NIC explore new or alternative economic models that have the potential to shore-up middle classes worldwide, or to weigh the geopolitical and economic implications of “solving climate change.”  

• The public will have the opportunity to comment on the NIC’s “first look” and refined language through August.

In addition to analytic crowdsourcing, other important shifts in our methodology and research design include:

• Building up from the regions to identify global trends and uncertainties, rather than starting from the global level and moving to the local;

• Assessing the future at five- and 20-years. We intend the five-year horizon to increase the decisionmaking relevance of Global Trends for individuals, organizations, and governments, while the 20-year horizon preserves the strategic perspective that is the hallmark of the Global Trends series.  

• Leveraging two rounds of global engagement, the first in pure “discovery” mode where we met with more than 1800 individuals, organizations, and governments in 30 countries to learn their views of the future.  The second phase, underway now, solicits feedback on our preliminary findings.

• Using scenarios in a targeted fashion to illustrate how a handful of critical trends, uncertainties, and choices might come together to challenge enduring principles in international decisionmaking, or to spotlight pathways to more prosperous, secure futures for more people.  

• Framing uncertainties, where possible, as specific choices before individuals, organizations and governments.

Please keep an eye on these Tumblr pages or follow-us on Twitter and Facebook.  We welcome viewpoints from one and all, and will do our best to consider your ideas as we evaluate how the key trends, uncertainties, and choices before individuals, organizations, and governments will shape the future.

Warm regards,
The NIC Global Trends Team

Return to Summary.

TAGS:gt2035 nicglobaltrends

Good news here.  Just hope we do not leave people hanging as in Syria and I hope we are in lock-step with our ROK allies.

I sure wish State had an Ambassador for Unconventional Warfare to complement its Ambassador for Counterterrorism.  I would direct him or her to apply the playbook outlined by George Kennan for political warfare here (http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/history/johnson/65ciafounding3.htm)  and apply it to the mafia-like crime family cult known as the Kim Family Regime.  The would be a great first project for State's Ambassador for UW.

Perhaps now everyone is coming to the conclusion that it is time to help the Korean people from and still living in the north to help themselves.  Will we decide to provide concrete support to resistance? http://www.kinu.or.kr/servlet/Download?num=1001&fno=1049&bid=DATA03&callback=http://www.kinu.or.kr/eng/pub/pub_03_01.jsp&ses=

upi.com

U.S. to fund North Korean groups working toward regime change

• Feb. 22, 2016 
•  1 min read 
•  original

SEOUL, Feb. 22 (UPI) -- The U.S. State Department has promised substantial financial support for North Korean defector organizations in South Korea, sending a strong message to Pyongyang as North Korea continues to crack down on migrants.

Defector representatives who had attended the closed-door meeting held in January at the State Department said Washington is to commit significant funds to defector organizations that can work toward internal regime change in the North, Yonhap reported Sunday.

Projects that meet U.S. requirements include information dispatches to North Korea – which has usually taken place across the demilitarized zone with helium balloon launches. The balloons typically carried flash drives with information denouncing the Kim regime, as well as South Korean media content and entertainment.

Other groups that could get funding include clandestine activist networks operating inside North Korea and organizations that promote North Korea human rights issues.

The new policy is to send a strong message to the North – that the United States is separating its target of the regime from the welfare of ordinary North Koreans, who are often susceptible to human rights abuses.

But South Korean analyst Yang Moo-jin of the University of North Korean Studies said working toward regime change or reform through defector organizations won't be easy, and "change will take time."

North Korea has increased border controls since Kim Jong Un fully assumed power, and the average inflow of North Koreans into South Korea has dropped sharply from an annual average of 2,500 to about 1,000.

Sources on North Korea also told Radio Free Asia that Pyongyang has launched a propaganda war against defections – a sign that the regime is struggling with the rising number of people leaving the country.

Jiro Ishimaru, the Japanese editor of Asia Press, a North Korea-focused news service, said North Korea recently aired footage of what it claims are images of North Korean defectors starving on the streets of South Korea.

The propaganda was aimed at discouraging defections, and according to eyewitnesses, drew tears from some North Koreans who lack information outside government propaganda.

Other spectators, however, said they knew the images were lies, according to sources.

50 Shades of Gray: Why the Gray Wars Concept Lacks Strategic Sense by Adam Elkus

We should remember Colin Gray (whom I do not think was the inspiration for the Gray Zone) and Clausewitz.  And my fear is that we do not heed Clausewitz' wisdom that we must first understand kind of war upon which we are about to embark and instead we focus on simply trying to name the war.

“The American defense community is especially prone to capture by the latest catchphrase, the new-sounding spin on an ancient idea which as jargon separates those who are truly expert from the lesser breeds without the jargon.”  Colin Gray

“Thus it has come about that our theoretical and critical literature, instead of giving plain, straightforward arguments in which the author at least always knows what he is saying and the reader what he is reading, is crammed with jargon, ending at obscure crossroads where the author loses its readers. Sometimes these books are even worse: they are just hollow shells. The author himself no longer knows just what he is thinking and soothes himself with obscure ideas which would not satisfy him if expressed in plain speech.”

Major General Carl von Clausewitz

Yes Adam is correct to note that USSOCOM has lost control of the new term  "Gray Zone" with everyone applying it to everything. (or old term -see below for the chart on the 100 names of "LIC" that I have been carrying around since 1994 - note "Gray Area Phenomena")   The USSOCOM White Paper can be accessed here: http://maxoki161.blogspot.com/2015/10/ussocom-white-paper-gray-zone.html)  And Yes Adam is right that Limited War and Compellence area useful concepts and do not need to be reinvented.

While I was hopeful that the Gray Zone would be a useful construct to describe the space between peace and where (where we have a strategy gap) what is really taking place in that space is what has always been taking place - revolution, resistance, and insurgency (RRI) .  Please take a look at the Assessing Revolutionary and Insurgent Strategies (ARIS) project at the link below.  I had preferred Political Warfare with a nod to George Kennan (http://maxoki161.blogspot.com/2015/03/sof-support-to-political-warfare-white.html) but USSOCOM adopted the Gray Zone.   But we should be focusing on is revolution, resistance, and insurgency (and of course this is nothing new). This is what we should be focusing on.  And of course our adversaries are fomenting and  exploiting RRI in the space between peace and war and it was good of Congress to recognize that they are conducting their unique forms of unconventional warfare in that space (thus the directive in NDAA 2016 Sec 1097 to DOD to develop a counter-UW strategy: https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/1735/text#toc-H57D78DE2C41D4347BF5202B774B80E94)  But now Gray Zone is being used to describe everything from Little Green Men in Ukraine to competition and potential conflict in the South China Sea to north Korean provocations (http://csis.org/publication/issues-insights-vol-15-no-13-struggling-gray-zone) 

Excerpts: 

Gray zone terminology has also been applied to characterize conflict in the South China Sea. Surely Putin’s various operations, Chinese territorial disputations, civil wars in Iraq and Syria, and Boko Haram’s terrorism in Nigeria are not equally gray? The idea that the term somehow meaningfully encompasses all of these conflicts is bizarre. But this is not the biggest flaw with the gray wars concept. It is yet another example of the recurring problem of military strategists and civilian analysts inventing new terminology to replace forgotten, yet perhaps more coherent concepts. Gray zone wars seem to be a composite of two very well known ideas in military strategy and political science: limited wars and compellence.

Gray wars are often defined as wars in which combatants minimize the scope and scale of combat. This is not an exotic new stratagem as much as the realization that, as Carl von Clausewitz noted, absolute war — war unconstrained by any kind of political limitation — is largely if not completely impossible in practice. The political context of war always involves some degree of minimizing the scope and scale of combat.

• http://www.soc.mil/ARIS/ARIS.html

• 

  
  

  Assessing Revolutionary And Insurgent Strategies (ARIS) Studies

  The Assessing Revolutionary and Insurgent Strategies (ARIS) project consists of research conducted for the US Army Special Operations Command by the National Security Analysis Department of The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Its goal is to produce academically rigorous yet operationally relevant research to develop and illustrate a common understanding of insurgency and revolution. Intended to form a bedrock body of knowledge for members of the Special Operations Forces, the ARIS studies allow users to distill vast amounts of material from a wide array of campaigns and extract relevant lessons, enabling the development of future doctrine, professional education, and training. The ARIS project follows in the tradition of research conducted by the Special Operations Research Office (SORO) of American University in the 1950s and 1960s, adding new research to that body of work, republishing original SORO studies, and releasing updated editions of selected SORO studies.

​

warontherocks.com

50 Shades of Gray: Why the Gray Wars Concept Lacks Strategic Sense

• by Adam Elkus 
•  Dec. 15, 2015 
•  7 min read 
•  original

Many men, as they age, start to worry about gray hairs. America’s military men, however, worry about gray wars. Gray wars are, as the former commander of U.S. Special Operations Command noted, wars in which groups or entities “seek to secure their objectives while minimizing the scope and scale of actual combat.” These wars and geopolitical conflicts, ranging from the Russian annexation of Crimea and its continued aggression in Ukraine to Boko Haram’s reign of terror in Nigeria, require allegedly new means of training, organization, and doctrine. There’s only one problem: The “gray wars” concept lacks even the most basic strategic sense. Like the book and movie 50 Shades of Grey, the gray wars concept grossly over-exaggerates its own transgressions from the norm. Beneath the hype is something rather ooh-la-lame rather than ooh-la-la.

First, it should be observed that this definition, which is applied to both wars with Vladimir Putin’s deniable “little green men” and Middle Eastern wars in Iraq and Syria featuring mobile combined arms maneuver, is incoherent. Yes, Putin is keeping it low-key, but can the same really be said of any of the Syrian or Iraqi factions contesting major cities and tweeting beheading pictures at each other? If the latter form of combat is somehow lacking in scope and scale, it is certainly not lacking in ferocity due to the intentions of the combatants (who are all fighting for their survival). And one can also quibble with the idea that these conflicts also are somehow lacking in scope and scale to begin with. Every faction in Syria and Iraq is fighting a war of utmost ferocity, and the expansion of the Islamic State to battlegrounds beyond Iraq and Syria suggests that the conflict may not necessarily be limited to its primary theaters of operation.

Gray zone terminology has also been applied to characterize conflict in the South China Sea. Surely Putin’s various operations, Chinese territorial disputations, civil wars in Iraq and Syria, and Boko Haram’s terrorism in Nigeria are not equally gray? The idea that the term somehow meaningfully encompasses all of these conflicts is bizarre. But this is not the biggest flaw with the gray wars concept. It is yet another example of the recurring problem of military strategists and civilian analysts inventing new terminology to replace forgotten, yet perhaps more coherent concepts. Gray zone wars seem to be a composite of two very well known ideas in military strategy and political science: limited wars and compellence.

(Continued at the link below)

http://warontherocks.com/2015/12/50-shades-of-gray-why-the-gray-wars-concept-lacks-strategic-sense/

Unification Options and Scenarios: Assisting A Resistance

The Korean Institute of National Unification published my latest paper in its journal.  Link below.

International Journal of Korean Unification Studies Vol. 24, No. 2, 2015, 127–152

https://www.kinu.or.kr/servlet/Download?num=1001&fno=1049&bid=DATA03&callback=http://www.kinu.or.kr/eng/pub/pub_03_01.jsp&ses=

Unification Options and Scenarios: Assisting A Resistance 

David S. Maxwell 

Unification of Korea is the only acceptable outcome on the Korean Peninsula. It is the only condition that will solve three of the most intractable problems in Northeast Asia: (1) the Kim family regime’s nuclear threat; (2) the human rights atrocities and crimes against humanity that have been perpetrated on the Korean people living in the north each and every day for the past six decades; and (3) the achievement peace and prosperity in the region. It is only through unification described as “a stable, secure, peaceful, economically vibrant, non-nuclear peninsula, reunified under a liberal constitutional form of government determined by the Korean people,” that can bring security and stability to Northeast Asia. 

There are four paths to unification: peaceful, internal regime change, regime collapse, and war. Because no one can foresee the path it will take, planning for unification has been stymied. Peaceful unification is the best but also counterintuitively the hardest to achieve. Regime collapse (that could lead to conflict) and war will result in the significant loss of blood and treasure and have global economic impact as a minimum. Further, it is possible that due to North Korean indoctrination that the Korean people living in the north may resist unification and form a resistance to conduct an insurgency against the ROK as it implements unification plans. 

There is the possibility of growing internal resistance against the Kim family regime. Considering the possibility of resistance after the removal of the regime, one way to prevent it may be to co-opt the internal resistance now, give it support and whether it is successful or not, this could help prevent organized resistance to unification. It is time to take a professional approach to supporting a resistance in the north. 

Keywords: Unification, Kim family regime, Dresden Initiative, resistance, unconventional warfare

Support to Korean Resistance: Has the Time Come?

by David S. Maxwell

Journal Article | August 5, 2015 - 1:50am

http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/support-to-korean-resistance-has-the-time-come

Support to Korean Resistance: Has the Time Come?

David S. Maxwell

“It is time to take a professional approach to supporting a resistance among the Korean people living in the north.”

Unification of Korea is the only outcome that will solve three of the most intractable problems in Northeast Asia: (1) the Kim Family Regime’s nuclear threat; (2) the human rights atrocities and crimes against humanity that have been perpetrated on the Korean people living in the north[1] each and every day for the past six decades; and (3) the threat to peace and prosperity in the region.  It is only through unification, described as  “a stable, secure, peaceful, economically vibrant, non-nuclear peninsula, reunified under a liberal constitutional form of government determined by the Korean people,”[2] that can bring security and stability to Northeast Asia.  No enlightened person can deny that this is what all Korean people deserve.

The combination of threats posed by North Korea with its conventional and asymmetric military capabilities, and the impact of conflict on the region and globally as well as the thought of the humanitarian crisis with 25 million hungry and suffering Korean people, has paralyzed the nations that have a major role in the region (the Republic of Korea, the United States, Japan, China, and Russia) as well as the broader international community.  For decades we have approached the security and humanitarian problems through stovepipes trying to solve pieces and parts of the overall problem.  There are the Six Party Talks trying to solve the nuclear problem while the regime continues to develop and test nuclear weapons and missile delivery systems while rewriting its constitution to call itself a nuclear state.  For the first time there is the United Nations Commission of Inquiry (COI) investigation of the human rights atrocities that called for the referral of Kim Jong-un to the International Criminal Court.  There are many other initiatives of engagement with governments and non-government organizations to assist the north with education, technology development, and agricultural development as well as food aid trying to assist the Korean people living in the north.

It is time to recognize the central problem and to understand that nuclear weapons and human suffering are the result of one thing:  the existence of the Kim Family Regime and its oppression and enslavement of the Korean people living in the north.  With recognition of the problem it may be possible to harness or at least orchestrate the actions of the many disparate organizations to achieve one goal: to free the people in the north and reunite the entire Korean peninsula.

Of course to many this is interpreted as regime change and in effect that is what I am arguing except that I am not arguing for an externally imposed regime change but one organized, led, and executed by people from within the northern part of Korea so that they can be free to peacefully reunite with their Korean brothers and sisters in the Southern half of the peninsula. 

What stymies the international community and regional powers from achieving decisive change in the Kim Family Regime behavior and solving the nuclear and human rights issues is first and foremost the existence of the Regime and its vital national interest: regime survival.   The regime will not succumb to international engagement or pressure or carrots or sticks.  It will only continue to practice its time worn strategy of conducting blackmail diplomacy by using provocations to gain political and economic concessions while conducting illicit activities (counterfeiting, drug trafficking, and weapons proliferation to rogue states and non-state actors) around the world to gain hard currency and vital resources to ensure survival of the regime.  There is no carrot or stick that will cause the regime to end its quest for nuclear weapons or lift the yoke of oppression from the people in the north because both are deemed as key to regime survival. 

The second obstacle that prevents action is the uncertainty of regime collapse that could very likely lead to conflict or the outbreak of war between north and South on the Peninsula.  The only thing we know with some certainty is that any form of conflict from regime collapse or war will lead to a tremendous loss of blood and treasure on the peninsula and the economic effects of conflict will have global impact.

Some will argue that supporting a resistance in North Korea poses a moral hazard as it could put innocent Koreans at risk if the Kim Family Regime conducts widespread security operations to suppress a resistance.  I would argue that the regime is already conducting such operations because the system is designed in such a way as to deliberately oppress the people to prevent coups and resistance.  Yes there will be crackdowns and Koreans will be arrested and put into the gulags and worse.  But I would counter the moral hazard argument with a reminder that the 25 million Koreans living in the north are already suffering horrendously with many being sent to the gulags and worse already.  They deserve to be free and the risk posed by supporting a resistance is one worth taking for the people to attain freedom.  We should consider the morality of not helping them and remember the history of not helping the suffering and oppressed which has in past times led to genocide in other parts of the world.

(Continued at the link below)

http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/support-to-korean-resistance-has-the-time-come

Fighting And Winning In The "Gray Zone" & My Thoughts on Revolution, Resistance and Insurgency

To add to this important essay I would recommend reading the USASOC White Paper SOF Support to Political Warfare as a construct for fighting and winning in the "gray zone."  It can be accessed at this link:  http://maxoki161.blogspot.com/2015/03/sof-support-to-political-warfare-white.html Below this article are my summarized thoughts in 7 charts on revolutions, resistance and insurgency and strategy in the gap between peace and war.

FIGHTING AND WINNING IN THE “GRAY ZONE”

David Barno and Nora Bensahel

May 19, 2015 · in Strategic Outpost

http://warontherocks.com/2015/05/fighting-and-winning-in-the-gray-zone/?singlepage=1

---

The United States possesses the most capable armed forces in the world. America leads the world in military expenditures, spending more than the next nine nations combined — seven of which are either U.S. friends or allies. In part because of this dominance, the world has been free of major power wars for decades.

But trends such as globalization, mass access to technology and communications, and asymmetric reactions to U.S. tactics in Afghanistan and Iraq are converging into an era where more and more conflicts are being fought at the lower end of the conflict spectrum. These form a “gray zone”between traditional notions of war and peace.

Gray zone conflicts are not formal wars, and little resemble traditional, “conventional” conflicts between states. If the spectrum of conflict is conceived as a line running from peaceful interstate competition on the far left to nuclear Armageddon on the far right, gray zone conflicts fall left of center. They involve some aggression or use of force, but in many ways their defining characteristic is ambiguity — about the ultimate objectives, the participants, whether international treaties and norms have been violated, and the role that military forces should play in response.

Gray zone conflicts abound in today’s world. Within the past 18 months alone, Russia annexed Crimea and is fomenting civil conflict and separatism in eastern Ukraine; the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) burst into international headlines by beheading civilians and grabbing land in Iraq and Syria; Boko Haram has been conducting a brutal insurgency in Nigeria; and the Houthi rebellion in Yemen has accelerated and driven the country’s president out of the capital. Each of these confrontations is characterized by“hybrid” threats that may combine subversion, destabilizing social media influence, disruptive cyber attacks, and anonymous “little green men” instead of recognizable armed forces making overt violations of international borders.

(Continue reading the above article at the link below)

http://warontherocks.com/2015/05/fighting-and-winning-in-the-gray-zone/?singlepage=1

Readings and References - Revolutions, Resistance, and Insurgency and SOF

"The first great center of area studies in the United States was not located in any university, but in Washington," McGeorge Bundy, onetime dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University and then president of the Ford Foundation, observed in 1964. The OSS, he said, was "a remarkable institution, half cops-and-robbers and half faculty meeting.” 

America may not be interested in unconventional warfare but UW is being practiced around the world by those who are interested in it

Background.  Revolutions, resistance, and insurgencies (RRI) are being conducted around the world and will continue to be the norm in the space between peace and war.

We have a strategy gap between diplomacy and war fighting and the US government (USG) requires a capability to achieve its objectives using all means necessary beyond diplomacy but short of war (adapted form George Kennan’s political warfare memo 1948)

Unconventional warfare can provide a strategic capability to operate in this gap.  To be effective, elements of the US military and Intelligence Community must continuously assess potential, nascent, and existing resistance organizations around the world on a day-to-day basis.  Assessments will contribute to understanding when USG interests and resistance objectives can be aligned and provide the intellectual foundation to determine if a UW campaign is warranted or if opponents’ UW campaigns should be countered. 

Non-Doctrinal Definition of Resistance:

An organized group (with leadership, objectives and strategy [a manifesto?]) opposing an organized structure (e.g., government or occupying power) and employs methods and activities (subversion to paramilitary and military) across a spectrum of legality from non-violent political to violent action to achieve (or force?) accommodation of its aims.

5 Categories of Revolutions - 1962-2009

•       Modify the Type of Government

–      NPA, FARC, Shining Path, Iranian Revolution, FMLN, Karen National Liberation Army

•       Identity or Ethnic Issues

–      LTTE, PLO, Hutu-Tutsi Genocides, Kosovo Liberation Army, PIRA

•       Drive out Foreign Power

–      Afghan Mujahidin, Vietcong, Chechen Revolution, Hizbollah, Hizbol Mujahedeen

•       Religious Fundamentalism

–      Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Taliban, Al Qaeda

•       Modernization or Reform

–      Niger Delta (MEND), Revolution United Front (RUF), Orange Revolution, Solidarity

Political Warfare:

George F. Kennan defined political warfare as “the logical application of Clausewitz’s doctrine in time of peace.”  While stopping short of the direct kinetic confrontation between two countries’ armed forces, “political warfare is the employment of all the means at a nation's command… to achieve its national objectives.”  A country embracing Political Warfare conducts “both overt and covert” operations in the absence of declared war or overt force-on-force hostilities. Efforts “range from such overt actions as political alliances, economic measures…, and ‘white’ propaganda to such covert operations as clandestine support of ‘friendly’ foreign elements, ‘black’ psychological warfare and even encouragement of underground resistance in hostile states.”  See  George Kennan, "Policy Planning Memorandum." May 4, 1948.

SOF Support to Political Warfare:

•       A whole-of-government endeavor, Political Warfare is best led by agencies beyond DoD and can only succeed if it is conducted in a way to “elevate civilian power alongside military power as equal pillars of U.S. foreign policy." 

•       SOF is well suited to lead DOD's contribution to Political Warfare’s activities, because they are relatively knowledgeable experts in this form of warfare

•       The overall Political Warfare effort relies on persuasive and coercive diplomacy, economic coercion and engagement, Security Sector Assistance (SSA), Unconventional Warfare (UW), and Information and Influence Activities (IIA).

Readings:

“U.S. Army Special Operations Command Counter-Unconventional Warfare White Paper:” https://publicintelligence.net/usasoc-counter-unconventional-warfare/  Focus on Chapter 3 (12 Pages)

Special Warfare: The Missing Middle In U.S. Coercive Options:” http://warontherocks.com/2014/11/special-warfare-the-missing-middle-in-u-s-coercive-options/  (About 8 pages)

RAND Report: “Improving Strategic Competence Lessons from 13 Years of War”

 http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR816.html   Skim the Summary (12 pages) and Chapter 4 (34 Pages) and focus on Chapter 3 (53 pages)

RAND Report: “Lessons from 13 Years of War Point to a Better U.S. Strategy:” http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_briefs/RB9800/RB9814/RAND_RB9814.pdf ) (4 pages)

SOF Support to Political Warfare: 

http://maxoki161.blogspot.com/2015/03/sof-support-to-political-warfare-white.html

Think Piece US Political Warfare Policy:

http://maxoki161.blogspot.com/2015/03/think-piece-draft-us-political-warfare.html

Other references for some historical context:

George Kennan's 1948 Policy Planning Staff Memorandum - The inauguration of organized political warfare.

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/history/johnson/65ciafounding3.htm 

Army Activities in Underdeveloped Areas Short of Declared War (BG Stillwell, 1961)

https://db.tt/G2a0p6Yl  

UNITED STATES OVERSEAS INTERNAL DEFENSE POLICY

September 1962

http://www.scribd.com/doc/50366332/Overseas-Internal-Defense-Policy-1962#scribd 

NSDD 32 US National Security Strategy 1982 (declassified Reagan NSS)

http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsdd/nsdd-32.pdf

And if not familiar with the ARIS project at USASOC, I strong recommend perusing it.

Assessing Revolutionary And Insurgent Strategies (ARIS) Studies

http://www.soc.mil/ARIS/ARIS.html 

The Assessing Revolutionary and Insurgent Strategies (ARIS) project consists of research conducted for the US Army Special Operations Command by the National Security Analysis Department of The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Its goal is to produce academically rigorous yet operationally relevant research to develop and illustrate a common understanding of insurgency and revolution. Intended to form a bedrock body of knowledge for members of the Special Operations Forces, the ARIS studies allow users to distill vast amounts of material from a wide array of campaigns and extract relevant lessons, enabling the development of future doctrine, professional education, and training. The ARIS project follows in the tradition of research conducted by the Special Operations Research Office (SORO) of American University in the 1950s and 1960s, adding new research to that body of work, republishing original SORO studies, and releasing updated editions of selected SORO studies.