Yeah, let's go back to privateering where each officer and rating gets a cut of the booty. Them's the good old days, Yarh!

Seriously, with how much discipline are you willing to dispence?

The question might be asked how much money is left when they go through now? Were the personnel able to enter the cash into the system and use it that would seem to be a benefit to me. Putting the funds back into the economy rather than whoever wanted to lift it would be much better, and if the equipment that was purchased was donated to community causes that would be the best.

Mrs. D.

The officers and enlisted men in Chester's anecdote didn't view the money as " theirs" as booty per se so much as " the unit's" for getting operational goals achieved by empowering on-the-spot decisions.

Could found money be corrupting - certainly - but I'm not sure how putting the money in the hands of a colonel or brigadier general instead alters the scenario.

Chester:

In many parts of the world, including Iraq, such sub-national networks are at least in part substitutes for the lack of a state Leviathan that is both legitimate and trustworthy. People fall back on criminal associations, clans, tribes, Imans, etc because that's where the trust and security are. In a police state like Iraq where the wrong joke could cost you your job if not not your limbs, where the sons of the ruler could excercise kingly power over any girl or woman, you looked to the tribe or clan or crime family, and they would do their best to look out for you. In return your first loyalty would be to them.

Our single biggest probelm, it seems to me is establishing ourselves as a Leviathan that will be there for the long term, at least long enough for a legitimate government to be established. Everyone in Iraq knows that we will go home sooner or later, and they will still be living where they are. People who join the Iraqi Army, for example, must either believe we will stay with them for the long run or keep contacts with their old family, tribe, or what have you and keep the protection of the tribe by helping them out from their position. This can include informing them of operations that will affect them, which means as often as not that terror cells will be tipped off to our operations.

To really attack these sub-national networks we have to be able to offer a convincing alternative - and here is where our domestic politics is a problem. If a President cannot maintian popular suport for a policy, sooner or later that policy wil be overturned, or the next President will change it. Why should anyone bet their lives that the US will have the will to stay as long as it takes to succeed?

Frankly, I am astonished that we have done as well as we have, given our track record with the Kurds and Shiites after the first Gulf War. I have no clever answers to this problem, I just want to point out that people have long memories and our actions or lack of them have serious consequences. Perhaps it is time to invest the necessary political capital to try and create some of sort of consensus for this new age we are in, something, a policy, or a strategy that will command broad support from both parties.

Mrs. Davis,

I wasn't advocating that all get cuts of the booty . . . and wouldn't you say that the Royal Navy duing the Napoleonic period, for example, was perhaps a pretty well-disciplined force?

Nevertheless you raise an interesting point about incentives. Specifically, I don't think it would work in this case for all involved to get a cut -- what's to keep folks from raiding wealthy locals who have no interest in terrorism. But the larger general point is this: there are markets for security and terrorism out there, some of which the US creates, but which the US is largely absent from as an actor. Somewhere up the totem pole, the different sides of the pyramid of national power meet, and someone gets to decide how to use both economic might and military force to accomplish our objectives. But this is an old industrial-age, stovepiped way of thinking about the problem. It completely ignores the micro-terrain of life in general, where economic and military realms are not clearly defined, but in which we expect our forces to survive and accomplish our goals. Yet Marines are taught little or nothing about the black market, which is likely to prevail in areas of operations, and I'd be surprised if USAID workers have any proficiency in providing for their own security. The realms of money and force are separated only in our own bureaucracies, not in life.

An interesting case: The DOD pays exorbitant sums of money to private military companies to provide security at various levels in varous places all over the globe. These companies are able to efficiently use that money to pay their operators a much higher salary than that available in the uniformed services. And these companies usually recruit from those services. This is while the DOD has retention and recruiting problems. So ultimately, the DOD is paying other firms to hire away its best workers at higher pay.

I think we are likely to see much more of such behavior, for better or worse. I think it could be better: find a Green Beret or Marine LtCol who's been to business school, give him $10m of government money, and tell him "go defeat the criminal networks in and pacify xxx area of Afghanistan/The Sudan/the Caucasus" I think we would be surprised at what the entrepreneurial results might be, even if the "mercenary" nature of it all makes us queasy.

"It raises an interesting proposition: could US-backed market actors -- call them what you want, contractors, warlords, influence entrepreneurs -- could these individuals, given large sums of cash, the ability to protect themselves, and very broad intent and mission statements take over or subsume some of the black marketplaces that Mark discusses above?"

How long until it descends into the "Heart of Darkness"?

Parachute into strange lands, with unreliable communication assets, make deals and gather intelligence from locals who speak obscure languages, practice swift decision-making with 20-40% of the necessary information, install local leadership, etc. Participate in manhunts when appropriate. Be prepared to conduct sensitive site exploitation of WMD production facilities.

Now, we trust our armed forces to do all of the above. We laud their execution of those things. But when money enters the picture, discipline starts to break down and it becomes the "Heart of Darkness"? Please. I submit that there is a higher percentage of military units that would handle funds properly than there are mutual fund managers.

Of course there will be controls, audits, checkups, whatever. And a scandal here and there of course. But let's not so handily dismiss these ideas. If our nation doesn't learn how to fight/cooperate with/replace transnational networks in the way I've described, others will.

Interesting post. John Robb has a website http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/ where he analizes the GWOT through the paradigm he calls "open source warfare". The basic idea is that both the US military & Al Qaeda use OSW, in different ways & with different "vendors".

For Al Qaeda, the leadership calls for global jihad, and local franchises pop up offering the local flavor of the product (Zarqawi in Iraq, JI in Indonesia, Tube Bombers in London, etc.). The various actors make alliances or deals with Islamist "charities", criminal organizations, other terror groups or rogue regimes to create "value added" jihad. The parallels to the ways in which modern global corporations operate is revealing.

As for the risk of corruption of the soldiers using captured cash to make local purchases, I suppose it exists, but it is small potatoes compared to the risk of corruption at the other end of the military supply chain. The huge amounts of money involved in the development & procurement of new weapons systems, makes possible the corruption of politicians, military brass & corporate executives. That's the more likely forum for corruption.

Chester, I just wanted to say thank you for what you're doing here and please send all our best, prayers to the soldiers in the field you talk to and let em know how much we appreciate and care about everything they're doing for us.

Working in a dirty world gets a man dirty at times, but one must also understand customs. What we consider bribes here are simple matters of compensation there.

It took me a while to figure out this is how things work globally, not just the middle east.

America is quite unique among nations in my personal opinion after having traveled through parts of western and eastern Europe, Russia, and Mexico.

Its not that bribes and corruption do not take place in our country, they do. The difference is how little in comparison to most parts of the world and how shocked people are when it happens here. Whereas in most other countries, its a matter of everyday life and people don't even give it a second of thought, life as usual, government as usual attitude.

Thus the UN scandal...

In truth, it kinda makes you wonder if we would just start throwing money around at the right people in the middle east, we could easily topple Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, etc. at what cost and to what end I dare not prognosticate.

Well... thanks again and tell all the troops God Bless and Protect Them!

Good on your Gunny, sounds like a practical man. Terrible that this is necessary. It is certainly necessary in the situation in which he finds himself.

Unfortunately, such local and practical arrangements will no doubt lead to some misuse and corruption by the unscruplous, in the long run deleterious to the discipline of the Corps, and part and parcel of the general slow rot that seems to be infecting all our great institutions.

I know that globalization and the neo-feudalistic world we seem to be headed into brings benefits, including this medium on which we all communicate, but I am old enough to, on the whole, prefer the world of the nation-state: the "age when nation-state control and the exercise of sovereignty and economic autarky were at their zenith and non-state actors like criminal syndicates were peripheral to events." Yeah, I know the globalization freaks love the new world, but I'll take the pre-1967 world any time. Wish it was on offer.

But given this world, what choice have people like the Gunny got ? You understand better how the Romans felt, making deals with the local barbarians, because they didn't get the right support or enough money from the central authorities back at Rome; who had no clue that their own stable era of a centralized powerful state was ending.

Last I knew, all Spec Ops units carried serious cash. There is some sort of control on how the money is spent(O-6's can spend so much on their own signature etc), but it will almost certainly never show up as a line item in the defense budget.

Soldier's Dad,

I remember stories about the A-teams in Afghanistan at the beginning of the war who had to sleep on top of pallets of cash, because it was the only way they could secure it. Could have been the CIA, but I think it was Special Forces.

I'm sorry, but I'm skeptical. All this talk about the rise of non-state actors strikes me as simply a management consulting fad peddled by RAND Corporation. Governments show every day that they have plenty of power over the things they care about, much more than at the time of WWII.

Chester/Mark,

Very thought provoking. I enjoyed this post. It brings out the creativity and imagination in the least imaginative people. I like it. But I need to think about it some more before I know where I would head with this. I think Michael and Soldier's Dad have a better handle on the possibilities than I would.

But I'm a very unimaginative person, usually. Good essay, this one.

Subsunk

Asia Times sai, "Iraq's proposed federal constitution will be defeated in the October 15 referendum,..."

You have to be a special sort of stupid to still believe the consttution will be reject. The Intrade.com contract on this is trading at 89%+ and has been in the high 80%s for over a week.

If you want a real contest how about predicting how many provinces will cross the veto threshold of 2/3rds voting no. My prediction is zero. Yep not even Anbar will be over 2/3rds voting no.

Thanks Subsunk !

Imagination is partly a talent and partly a learned skill of horizontal thinking ( used to be called lateral thinking).

The creativity theorist Edward DeBono has a number of books with exercises to develop this capacity. Also, Herman Kahn's discussion of the use of scenarios in futurism over at the Hudson Institute site is worth looking at.

"But when money enters the picture, discipline starts to break down and it becomes the "Heart of Darkness"? Please. I submit that there is a higher percentage of military units that would handle funds properly than there are mutual fund managers."

Your right and I deserved that. However I remember a Marine who became a warlord when pappy died; and that makes me leery about putting people in these situations.

Daniel