Invasion Percolation and the War on Terror

Marc Schulman, at American Future, has a good post up about Iraq, and what we should do with it going forward. His advice is to quarantine it:

We are where we are, and I believe that the American national interest can best be served by redeploying our troops to Iraq's borders with Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Syria to limit the ingress and egress of current and future terrorists. Iraq's perimeter should become a no-fly zone. Our navy can guard Iraq's small coastline.

This is not an obviously wrong suggestion, which, sadly, means it is one of the better ones about Iraq, but I think there is a better strategy.

This is from the book Complexity and Network Centric Warfare:

In natural systems, we can consider the movement of a boundary through a medium (for example, the boundary of an atomic surface, the boundary of a growing cluster of bacteria, or the front of advance of a fluid "invasion" of a medium such as a crystalline rock).

What happens if we restrict ourselves to looking at the boundary between two different regimes (such as two different nationalities or two opposing armed forces), and how this would move over time depending on the local coevolution of the elements involved?

The most relevant case from our point of view is the front of advance of fluid "invasion" of a medium. We can represent the medium itself as consisting of a lattice of cells, each with either a 1 or 0 in it. A "1" represents the fact that that cell can be wetted. The proportion of cells containing a "1" is defined as p. For large configurations, we can also interpret p as the probability that a particular cell contains a "1." A "0" represents the fact that the cell cannot be wetted–it thus "pins" the advance of the fluid through the medium, at least locally.

It turns out that for this case, when the pinning probability p is greater than a critical value pc, the growth of the interface is halted by a spanning path of pinning cells. Such models of interface or boundary movement exhibit fractal properties of the interface. We shall see similar effects later in our discussion in Chapter 4 of the control of the battlespace using ideas based on preventing the flow of opposing forces and/or third parties through the space. Rather than choosing the next cell to invade at random, as in the DPD model, we can use a model of the process that is more akin to the manoeuverist principle of applying your strength where the opponent is weak–in other words, the cell next to be wetted is the one where the local pinning force of the medium is weakest. Such a model of the boundary movement is the Invasion Percolation model.

If this is correct, then it is quite possible that the entire War on Terror has been misconceived from the beginning.

It is important to realize that we, the West and Western Values, are not the advancing boundary. Radical Islam is. Whether it's flowing into failed states, power vacuums, or segregated Muslim enclaves in Europe, it is following the optimal strategy of wetting where the "local pinning force of the medium is weakest." We have responded by attacking the places where the local pinning force of anti-Westernism is strongest. If this continues, it seems certain that Radical Islam will succeed in wetting a critical number of Muslim clusters. And then comes the conflagration.

To battle this, we must build up the anti-jihadist pinning force where it has the greatest potential to work. While this has several implications for our global struggle, the most immediate is what to do with Iraq, should it all fall apart:

The answer, I believe, is Kurdistan. If there is one place to make a stand in Iraq, it is there, protecting the most pro-American and pro-Western people on the planet.

More on this later.