James Mattis is a retired U.S. general. Why am I sure that Mattis couldn't recognize a swarm attack? Because if he could, he would have known the kind of danger Trump was working to defuse when he acted to quell mob violence in Washington, D.C. during the 'George Floyd protests,' and so his public criticism of Trump would have been milder and worded differently.
I'll assume that Mattis could recognize one type of swarm attack, the best-understood one. But as I mentioned yesterday, there are two types of swarm attacks.
The first type, in one sentence, is a massed attack.[1] The other type is the use of a few combatants to create the impression that a massed attack is happening. So the second type could be described as a faux swarm attack made to look like the real thing.
It's this second type which is a serious threat to cities in this era. That was the biggest lesson of the terrorist attack in 2008 simply called 'Mumbai.'
There are additional lessons to be drawn from Mumbai. Top of the list is that the attackers weren't professionals, they weren't jihadists or suicide attackers. They were punks. A small number of Pakistani punks -- 10 to be exact. They were paid to take rudimentary training in the use of automatic weapons, then they were talked through their attack via cell phone by men who are professionals.
The professionals never had to show up for the attack. They weren't even in India; they were in Pakistan. They watched the Mumbai police response to the attack on live Indian TV. So they were able to tell the punks over the phone where the police were heading to chase them down. Until the Mumbai police wised up and with government okay blacked out the live broadcasts -- something that I think would be impossible for American police to accomplish.
The cell phone tactic was also used to great effect by criminals during the August 2011 London Riots. There it took Scotland Yard -- and the British military -- many hours to figure out that criminal gangs were communicating via encrypted Blackberry cell phones; this to stay ahead of the police and coordinate robberies during the rioting, which the criminals fueled by starting fires in every store they hit.
During the George Floyd protests in New York City, at least one American criminal gang also made good use of cell phones to coordinate robberies and stay ahead of the police.
To return to Mumbai, due to luck and a stratagem having nothing to do with the attack on Mumbai, the police learned early in the attack that it was a faux swarm attack. Otherwise, it would have looked to them as if the city had been invaded by many armed combatants.
How easy would it be for the most sophisticated terrorist groups to copy Mumbai for an attack on a major American city? Given what they now know about American police actions during wide-scale mob violence -- which they know because of extensive U.S. media coverage of the George Floyd protests -- it would be child's play for them.
Al Qaeda wouldn't need to stick their necks out; they'd coordinate with Islamic State, as they've done in Afghanistan and probably other places where they didn't want their name on a terrorist attack.
I have yet to discuss what happened in Bangkok, Thailand in 2010 in relation to an asymmetrical attack on American cities. The Bangkok situation wasn't a faux swarm attack but it was also an illusion. The plan was to create the impression that the Thai military was shooting unarmed peaceful protesters. The goal was to make the government look as bad as possible.
How it worked was that Thai farmers with nothing to do at the time were paid to travel to Bangkok and stage protests to express their grievances against the government. Once the protests got unruly, protesters began telling TV reporters that the military was shooting at them with live bullets.
Some soldiers were indeed shooting -- shooting back at protesters they claimed were shooting at them with live bullets. So then a protester would hold up a homemade slingshot and ask the TV reporter, 'Does this look like a gun to you?'
What almost nobody knew at that juncture was that inside the camp for the protesters was hidden a weapons cache and military-style command center. In the guise of peaceful protesters, sharpshooters with military training were shooting at soldiers (and probably also the Bangkok police, who'd called in the military when they were overwhelmed).
The plot was revealed even before the military put a stop to the protests. It happened because the commander of the sharpshooters was such a publicity hog, he couldn't resist boasting to the press.
As to why the protesters didn't rat out the sharpshooters in their camp, because the protesters were in effect hostages. When they'd enough of protesting and wanted to go home, only then did they learn that the I.D. cards they'd given for safekeeping to the protest organizers, which they needed for travel in Thailand, would not be returned to them if they tried to leave the party early.
And for good reason, they were afraid for their lives if they told.
But the illusion worked so well that if the commander of the sharpshooters had been able to keep his mouth shut, a group of plotters might have stood a chance to bring down the Thai government. As it was, they wreaked so much havoc that the government reeled.
I'll add it's a virtual certainty that the talkative commander was in cell phone contact with the suspected mastermind, a Thai who wasn't in Thailand.
That's the twenty-first century. I invite the mayors of American cities and their police forces to join it.
(1) In more than one sentence, "Military swarming is a battlefield tactic designed to maximize target saturation, and thereby overwhelm or saturate the defenses of the principal target or objective." (Wikipedia)
In yet another sentence, "Swarming is a seemingly amorphous, but deliberately structured, coordinated, strategic way to perform military strikes from all directions. It employs a sustainable pulsing of force and/or fire that is directed from both close-in and stand-off positions. (John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, RAND, 2000)
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https://www.stripes.com/news/us/how-mattis-reached-his-breaking-point-and-decided-to-speak-out-1.632599
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/05/politics/john-kelly-agrees-with-jim-mattis-on-trump/index.html
https://nypost.com/2020/06/02/how-nyc-looters-pull-off-a-well-organized-scheme-to-target-high-end-stores/
https://pundita.blogspot.com/2011/08/surprise-tactic-broke-uk-crime-wave-but.html (unforced errors 2 and 3)
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/opinion/15arquilla.html
("The Coming Swarm")
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