Model an insurgency

David Kilcullen spoke at SAIS recently, giving what I suspect is his one of his favorite talks: Fight Club as a model of an insurgency. Kilcullen was the senior counterinsurgency advisor to General Petraeus, who you may have heard is a smart guy. He's had a bunch of really good ideas and his latest take on Afghanistan in The New Yorker is particularly noteworthy.

Insurgencies develop in strange ways and using Fight Club as a model is useful because, as it takes place in America, the observer isn't as distracted by cultural differences, thus allowing the universal attributes of insurgencies to become more apparent.

One general problem that's obvious without Fight Club is the problem of young men. One anthropological theory is that human society developed to deal with agitated or feisty adolescents. Primatologists politely refer to young male monkeys undergoing "dispersal," but there came a point when simply booting young males out of the troop/tribe/group wasn't feasible. Rules and sanctions from a leviathan (or religion) are needed to control people, especially the young males. When formal rules and sanctions disappear, you'd better watch out for the young men, especially when they are well armed...Disaffected youth must be reckoned; tension builds when achievements don't match expectations. The Middle East has quite a youth bulge and when educated people don't find self-actualization (read: decent jobs) they get mad. 

Fight Club brilliantly lays out the developmental stages of an insurgency:

1) Grumpy like-minded individuals find each other
2) A Leader emerges
3) Group formation, rules are established
4) Organization formalization, Tyler Durden starts giving homework assignments
5) Movement - ideological control by the founder can be lost at this point
6) Revolution - intimidate & infiltrate authorities; attempt to overthrow the government

Violence increases at each stage as members are desensitized to brutality and undergo hatred transference; moving from action against the wider out-group to a specific individual. The initial cause can diminish as members become motivated by secondary issues, such as profit or revenge ("His name is Robert Paulson...")

So what do you do about it? One of the most effective means of dealing with radicalized young men is finding them wives and giving them incentives to have children. In the late 70's an extremely successful PLO deradicalization program  involved taking out marriage ads for 5,000 radical fighters. Less than one percent later returned to fighting. An ol' ball and chain can be quite effective at keeping the peace!

There may be no silver bullet, but the first place to start is understanding the causes and group dynamics within an insurgency. And why have the rules, sanctions, and social norms failed to prevent violence? COIN isn't easy.