Crime <--> Insurgency

[Kinophile]

 https://medium.com/@MPProjectJunto/observations-of-the-contemporary-urban-crime-environment-part-ii-14c75cd0a234#.avm8qnpqd

Read down to the Orchestrating Street Crime section. 

This article (and it's part 1) suggests to me that a non-russian speaking,  NATO force would face serious difficulties controlling conquered, pro-Russia regions/cities. The only effective force would be a Russian speaking Ukrainian one, with a strong police/paramilitary segment .Basically, there is a significant cultural barrier.

This was also true of Iraq, but here there is a far stronger and more overt Tier 1 power to back up and empower resistance. 

This would imply that NATO should support UKR forces with everything BUT actual boots on the ground. Training,  equipping,  sustaining an already effective UKR ground forces (along with heavyvrecon/intel suppor)  would give power to the UKR punch, without getting caught directly in the resistance suppression efforts. 

If so,  then a follow-up expansion game to CMBS should properly deal with NATOs entanglement in a complex,  multi faceted war where traditional military fights blend in and out of civilian control efforts .

This could be a fascinating development of CMBS, but would require heavy research of current technological trends,  social theory and civ/Mil interfacing. 

Ie,  not gonna happen with BFC :-) not a complaint,  they're a strictly mil-sim game developers. 

But still - could make for some interesting scenarios ! 

[Erwin]

A interesting take on the subject.  Probably the most realistic objective would be to be able to bleed the invaders until they go away (like Afghanistan, Vietnam etc.) 

Re the social stuff, take a look at Matrix Games "Decisive Campaigns - Barbarossa".  That has a very innovative role playing aspect that forces you to make policy decisions eg: partisans and how to treat local population - in addition to negotiating with competing military factions to get the resources you want for your sectors of the war.  It's operational level, but that is a more appropriate level for civ/mil interfacing etc.

However, some years ago (well, last century) I played a first-person military role-playing game on exactly that subject developed at USC's ISI research establishment for platoon leaders and troops.

[Kinophile]

Remember the name of that game? 

More on the subject, staying closer to RUS-UKR:

Russia has operationalized crime as an integral component of statecraft in its near abroad

[panzersaurkrautwerfer]

Well, organized crime is pretty much a wing of the Russian government as is, so it's not shocking it's included as part of their military-political operations.

Iraq was pretty heavy on the insurgent-criminal crossover.  You basically had two flavors of insurgent in my opinion:

1. Ideological anti-westerners.  Tactically, they were less common outside of suicide attackers, but they comprised most of the leadership/organizational folks at what I'd consider company-battalion level (or, imagine a cell, which runs 4-8 people as a platoon, so anyone directing cells generally had it out for the west, either in a Baathist rejectionist scheme or some sort of Islamist focus).  

2. Hoodlums.  They didn't shoot RPGs at you because they didn't like you (they didn't like you though), they did it because one of the guys from category 1 gave them a launcher, and 50 bucks up front to shoot it at Americans, 50 afterwards if they followed through, and 25 to put the video on youtube.  As the insurgency circa 2007-2008 started to fall apart (surge/awakening/etc), a lot of these guys just went from being criminal-merc types, to being just straight criminals.  One of the worst "attacks" we had circa 2011 was when a "protection" scheme went terribly haywire.  Some former IED dudes, lacking external funding any more would build small nuisance type IEDs (think like, large grenades) and unless you paid them a fee, one of these bombs would find their way to your business.  

On the way to distribute these devices, one of the bombs decided NOW was it's time to shine, and it caught fire.  Truck stops, Iraqis/bystanders do what Iraqis/bystanders do (SOMETHING DANGEROUS?!?!?! I BETTER STAND BY IT!) , and just in time for the Iraqi police to show up, the whole thing sympathetic detonates killing 40 or so people.

Which gets back to why working with criminals is funtimes.  

a. They're in it for their own purposes, and not responsive to ideological pressure.  Once you can't pay them, or offer them things, they tend to go off in their own direction which often as we've already seen in the Ukraine can be counter-mission.

b. They predate on the local populace extensively.  Cliche from the Mao, but the insurgent is a fish in the ocean of the populace.  The criminal is actively exploiting that populace, and as we would discover in Iraq, the populace often felt no compunction to protect these criminals (we arrested a lot of these folks on tips from the population, or found a few of them dead and dumped in the streets).  The insurgent generally still leaches off the population/inflicts collateral damage, but he has an ideological message that can influence the population and in certain circles carry currency.  

The criminal can do this do, and the boundary between the two groups is narrow indeed sometimes (see FARC, and Columbia in general, the ongoing Mexican troubles), but it is much weaker/pragmatic (if the criminal group is sufficiently degraded, it has very little support as it's appeal to the populace is basically paying them off, the insurgent and other ideas-based forces can still rely on aging communists in former East Germany to send them money or something).  

Long term solution would require a Ukrainian force on the ground that would understand the culture/local dynamics to man the checkpoints, do patrols and resolve low level problems.  Logically the best use of NATO forces would be:

1. Training/advisory missions.  

2. Accountability operations (basically helping keep the Ukrainians "honest" which would be a key part of winning an insurgency type fight)

3. HVT elimination, either non-lethal (snatch and grabs) or lethal fires (as NATO has a much better precision fires component)

4. Peace Keeping in the classical sense (keeping the Ukrainian and Russian forces from having at each other again)

5. Regional QRF

Really while it's harder in some ways with a Russian presence, it has a much more capable host nation force, a largely discredited external support network for the insurgents/criminals (in Iraq, the insurgents had a magic islamic utopia to pretend they could deliver, Russia has had it's time in the Eastern Ukraine and there's not much to show for it), and a much narrower cultural divide (it is a markedly different culture, but NATO troops passing through a Ukrainian church isn't going to cause someone to go all Jesus is greatest and explode in a market somewhere).  

[Kinophile]

Thank you,  vegetables cannon. Very illuminating . 

Edited November 20, 2016 by kinophile

[Erwin]

3 hours ago, kinophile said:

Remember the name of that game? 

More on the subject, staying closer to RUS-UKR:

Russia has operationalized crime as an integral component of statecraft in its near abroad

Can't recall other that it had a suitably academically boring research name.