Can't leave you kids alone for a minute.

I deliberately did not pick up a paper or watch TV (none of the latter to be had anyway) for the past five days. I did sneak a peak at the Guardian's football page to find out how the World Cup final ended up. Things didn't work out schedule-wise and I spent most of the time the game was on wandering around the Pine Ridge Reservation looking for a place to watch it. Wanna see the definition of a blank stare? Walk into a bar on an Indian reservation and ask them to put on the World Cup.

Anyhoo... So, I fire up the old laptop this morning to catch up on things and find that I had driven back in time to 1982. It would be trite and yet sadly true to cop the typical Middle American attitude towards the Arab-Israeli conflict, e.g. "They're all fucking nuts, let them just slaughter each other and be done with it." But, we can't do that as we are all quite hip deep in the entire matter and there is that pesky carotid artery of oil flowing from the region.

I'd like to make a quick point about this. It is really sort of a meta-comment on the entire mess that has been going on in that region for the last couple of months. This guy Jamie K at Blood and Treasure points to an anonymous source who writes:

…the capture of Israeli troops, first one in the south, then two in the north, has galvanized Israel. The kidnappings represent a level of Arab tactical prowess that previously was the Israeli domain. They also represent a level of tactical slackness on the Israeli side that was previously the Arab domain. These events hardly represent a fundamental shift in the balance of power. Nevertheless, for a country that depends on its cultural superiority, any tremor in this variable reverberates dramatically. Hamas and Hezbollah have struck the core Israeli nerve. Israel cannot ignore it.

It had to happen sometime I suppose but the terrorists are actually getting smart. It probably has a lot to do with the very harsh,Darwiniann world of being a terrorist. Suicide bombers notwithstanding, if one wants to have a long and ordistinguishedd career in the global jihad business one needs to be very smart and very tacticallysophisticatedd. The dumb ones tend to get weeded out pretty fast. There are a lot of very smart, very tactically and technically sophisticated people with the financial backing of very large nation states trying to kill them all the time.

And what I fear is thatHezbollahh, Hamas, et. al. have finally begun to take seriously the notions of Fourth Generation or Open Source Warfare. I would urge readers to spend some time exploring those two links as well as bookmarking John Robb'sexcellentt site, Global Guerillas which I have linked in the sidebar as well.

The essential concepts of 4th Generation War aren't anything new. It is really just old-school guerilla tactics and cell-based organization mixed in with the speed and depth of the information resources of networks taking place in the environment of the globalized, interdependent economy and mediasphere. The result is a force multiplier that makes it possible for non-state combatants, i.e.Hezbollahh and AlQaidaa to negate the huge technological and force advantages of traditional military powers, i.e. the U.S. and Israel.

From the Defense in the National Interest Website:

Perhaps most odd of all, being seen as too successful militarily may create a backlash, making the opponent's other elements of 4GW more effective.

The authors of the first paper on the subject captured some of this strangeness when they predicted:

The distinction between war and peace will be blurred to the vanishing point. It will be nonlinear, possibly to the point of having no definable battlefields or fronts. The distinction between 'civilian' and 'military' may disappear.

If indeed it is the case thatHezbollahh, et. al. have finally started getting smart about this kind of thing, and there is evidence that they are, then we are in for some interesting times. And I mean in the Chinese sense.