[[!meta title="The Counterrevolution"]] * [The Counterrevolution](http://bernardharcourt.com/the-counterrevolution/). * By Bernard E. Harcourt. ## Index [[!toc startlevel=2 levels=4]] ## Genealogy ### Mass-scale warfare * MAD * Massive retaliation * Game theory * Systems analisys * Nuclear war ### Counterinsurgency * Modern warfare * Unconventional, counter-guerrila * Special Ops * Surgical operations ### Mao's “Eight Points of Attention” plus two principles 1. Talk to people politely. 2. Observe fair dealing in all business transactions. 3. Return everything borrowed from the people. 4. Pay for anything damaged. 5. Do not beat or scold the people. 6. Do not damage crops. 7. Do not molest women. 8. Do not ill-treat prisoners-of-war. Two other principles were central to Mao’s revolutionary doctrine: first, the importance of having a unified political and military power structure that consolidated, in the same hands, political and military considerations; and second, the importance of psychological warfare. More specifically, as Paret explained, “proper psychological measures could create and maintain ideological cohesion among fighters and their civilian supporters.” 7 ### Paret's (1960) tasks of “counterguerrilla action” 1. The military defeat of the guerrilla forces. 2. The separation of the guerrilla from the population. 3. The reestablishment of governmental authority and the development of a viable social order. ### Petraeus: 3 key pillars 1. "The first is that the most important struggle is over the population." 2. "Allegiance of the masses can only be secured by separating the small revolutionary minority from the passive majority, and by isolating, containing, and ultimately eliminating the active minority. In his accompanying guidelines," 3. "Success turns on collecting information on everyone in the population. Total information is essential to properly distinguish friend from foe and then extract the revolutionary minority. It is intelligence— total information awareness—that renders the counterinsurgency possible." ## Excerpts ### Torture In Modern Warfare, Trinquier quietly but resolutely condoned torture. The interrogations and related tasks were considered police work, as opposed to military operations, but they had the exact same mission: the complete destruction of the insurgent group. Discussing the typical interrogation of a detainee, captured and suspected of belonging to a terrorist organization, Trinquier wrote: “No lawyer is present for such an interrogation. If the prisoner gives the information requested, the examination is quickly terminated; if not, specialists must force his secret from him. Then, as a soldier, he must face the suffering, and perhaps the death, he has heretofore managed to avoid.” Trinquier described specialists forcing secrets out of suspects using scientific methods that did not injure the “integrity of individuals,” but it was clear what those “scientific” methods entailed. 4 As the war correspondent Bernard Fall suggests, the political situation in Algeria offered Trinquier the opportunity to develop “a Cartesian rationale” to justify the use of torture in modern warfare. 5 Similarly minded commanders championed the use of torture, indefinite detention, and summary executions. They made no bones about it. [...] In his autobiographical account published in 2001, Services Spéciaux. Algérie 1955–1957, General Paul Aussaresses admits to the brutal methods that were the cornerstone of his military strategy. 6 He makes clear that his approach to counterinsurgency rested on a three-pronged strategy, which included first, intelligence work; second, torture; and third, summary executions. The intelligence function was primordial because the insurgents’ strategy in Algeria was to infiltrate and integrate the population, to blend in perfectly, and then gradually to involve the population in the struggle. To combat this insurgent strategy required intelligence—the only way to sort the dangerous revolutionaries from the passive masses—and then, violent repression. “The first step was to dispatch the clean-up teams, of which I was a part,” Aussaresses writes. “Rebel leaders had to be identified, neutralized, and eliminated discreetly. By seeking information on FLN leaders I would automatically be able to capture the rebels and make them talk.” 7 The rebels were made to talk by means of torture. Aussaresses firmly believed that torture was the best way to extract information. It also served to terrorize the radical minority and, in the process, to reduce it. The practice of torture was “widely used in Algeria,” Aussaresses acknowledges. Not on every prisoner, though; many spoke freely. “It was only when a prisoner refused to talk or denied the obvious that torture was used.” 8 Aussaresses claims he was introduced to torture in Algeria by the policemen there, who used it regularly. But it quickly became routine to him. “Without any hesitation,” he writes, “the policemen showed me the technique used for ‘extreme’ interrogations: first, a beating, which in most cases was enough; then other means, such as electric shocks, known as the famous ‘gégène’; and finally water.” Aussaresses explains: “Torture by electric shock was made possible by generators used to power field radio transmitters, which were extremely common in Algeria. Electrodes were attached to the prisoner’s ears or testicles, then electric charges of varying intensity were turned on. This was apparently a well-known procedure and I assumed that the policemen at Philippeville [in Algeria] had not invented it.” 9 (Similar methods had, in fact, been used earlier in Indochina.) Aussaresses could not have been more clear: The methods I used were always the same: beatings, electric shocks, and, in particular, water torture, which was the most dangerous technique for the prisoner. It never lasted for more than one hour and the suspects would speak in the hope of saving their own lives. They would therefore either talk quickly or never. The French historian Benjamin Stora confirms the generalized use of torture. He reports that in the Battle of Algiers, under the commanding officer, General Jacques Massu, the paratroopers conducted massive arrests and “practiced torture” using “electrodes […] dunking in bathtubs, beatings.” General Massu himself would later acknowledge the use of torture. In a rebuttal he wrote in 1971 to the film The Battle of Algiers, Massu described torture as “a cruel necessity.” 10 According to Aussaresses, torture was condoned at the highest levels of the French government. “Regarding the use of torture,” Aussaresses [...] For Aussaresses, as for Roger Trinquier, torture and disappearances were simply an inevitable byproduct of an insurgency—inevitable on both sides of the struggle. Because terrorism was inscribed in revolutionary strategy, it had to be used in its repression as well. In a fascinating televised debate in 1970 with the FLN leader and producer of The Battle of Algiers, Saadi Yacef, Trinquier confidently asserted that torture was simply a necessary and inevitable part of modern warfare. Torture will take place. Insurgents know it. In fact, they anticipate it. The passage is striking: I have to tell you. Whether you’re for or against torture, it makes no difference. Torture is a weapon that will be used in every insurgent war. One has to know that… One has to know that in an insurgency, you are going to be tortured. And you have to mount a subversive organization in light of that and in function of torture. It is not a question of being for or against torture. You have to know that all arrested prisoners in an insurgency will speak—unless they commit suicide. Their confession will always be obtained. So a subversive organization must be mounted in function of that, so that a prisoner who speaks does not give away the whole organization.16 “Torture?” asks the lieutenant aide de camp in Henri Alleg’s 1958 exposé The Question. “You don’t make war with choirboys.” 18 Alleg, a French journalist and director of the Alger républicain newspaper, was himself detained and tortured by French paratroopers in Algiers. His book describes the experience in detail, and in his account, torture was the inevitable product of colonization and the anticolonial struggle. As Jean-Paul Sartre writes in his [...] In an arresting part of The Battle of Algiers it becomes clear that many of the French officers who tortured suspected FLN members had themselves, as members of the French Resistance, been victims of torture at the hands of the Gestapo. It is a shocking moment. We know, of course, that abuse often begets abuse; but nevertheless, one would have hoped that a victim of torture would recoil from administering it to others. Instead, as Trinquier suggests, torture became normalized in Algeria. This is, as Sartre describes it, the “terrible truth”: “If fifteen years are enough to transform victims into executioners, then this behavior is not more than a matter of opportunity and occasion. Anybody, at any time, may equally find himself victim or executioner.” 20 ### Misc The central tenet of counterinsurgency theory is that populations—originally colonial populations, but now all populations, including our own—are made up of a small active minority of insurgents, a small group of those opposed to the insurgency, and a large passive majority that can be swayed one way or the other. The principal objective of counterinsurgency is to gain the allegiance of that passive majority. And its defining feature is that counterinsurgency is not just a military strategy, but more importantly a political technique. Warfare, it turns out, is political. On the basis of these tenets, counterinsurgency theorists developed and refined over several decades three core strategies. First, obtain total information: every communication, all personal data, all metadata of everyone in the population must be collected and analyzed. Not just the active minority, but everyone in the population. Total information awareness is necessary to distinguish between friend and foe, and then to cull the dangerous minority from the docile majority. Second, eradicate the active minority: once the dangerous minority has been identified, it must be separated from the general population [...] and eliminated by any means possible—it must be isolated, contained, and ultimately eradicated. Third, gain the allegiance of the general population: everything must be done to win the hearts and minds of the passive majority. It is their allegiance and loyalty, and passivity in the end, that matter most. Counterinsurgency warfare has become our new governing paradigm in the [...] imagination. It drives our foreign affairs and now our domestic policy as well. But it was not always that way. For most of the twentieth century, we governed ourselves differently in the United States: our political imagination was dominated by the massive battlefields of the Marne, of Verdun, by the Blitzkrieg and the fire-bombing of Dresden—and by the use of the atomic bomb. [...] warfare. Yet the transition from large-scale battlefield warfare to anticolonial struggles and the Cold War in the 1950s, and to the war against terrorism since 9/11, has brought about a historic transformation in our political imagination and in the way that we govern ourselves. In contrast to the earlier sweeping military paradigm, we now engage in surgical microstrategies of counterinsurgency abroad and at home. This style of warfare—the very opposite of large-scale battlefield wars like World War I or II—involves total surveillance, surgical operations, targeted strikes to eliminate small enclaves, psychological tactics, and political techniques to gain the trust of the people. The primary target is no longer a regular army, so much as it is the entire population. It involves a new [...] The result is radical. We are now witnessing the triumph of a counterinsurgency model of government on American soil in the absence of an insurgency, or uprising, or revolution. The perfected logic of counterinsurgency now applies regardless of whether there is a domestic insurrection. We now face a counterinsurgency without insurgency. A counterrevolution without revolution. The pure form of counterrevolution, without a revolution, as a simple modality of governing at home—what could be called “The Counterrevolution.” Counterinsurgency practices were already being deployed domestically in the [...] new internal enemies. It is vital that we come to grips with this new mode of governing and recognize its unique dangers, that we see the increasingly widespread domestication of counterinsurgency strategies and the new technologies of digital surveillance, drones, and hypermilitarized police for what they are: a counterrevolution without a revolution. We are facing something radical, new, and dangerous. It has been long in the making, historically. It is time to identify and expose it. [...] so on. I argued that we have become an “expository society” where we increasingly exhibit ourselves online, and in the process, freely give away our most personal and private data. No longer an Orwellian or a panoptic society characterized by a powerful central government forcibly surveilling its citizens from on high, ours is fueled by our own pleasures, proclivities, joys, and narcissism. And even when we try to resist these temptations, we have practically no choice but to use the Internet and shed our digital traces. I had not fully grasped, though, the relation of our new expository society to [...] strikes, indefinite detention, or our new hypermilitarized police force at home. But as the fog lifts from 9/11, the full picture becomes clear. The expository society is merely the first prong of The Counterrevolution. And only by tying together our digital exposure with our new mode of counterinsurgency governance can we begin to grasp the whole architecture of our contemporary political condition. And only by grasping the full implications of this new mode of governing—The Counterrevolution—will we be able to effectively resist it and overcome. [...] approach targeting small revolutionary insurgencies and what were mostly Communist uprisings. Variously called “unconventional,” “antiguerrilla” or “counterguerrilla,” “irregular,” “sublimited,” “counterrevolutionary,” or simply “modern” warfare, this burgeoning domain of military strategy flourished during France’s wars in Indochina and Algeria, Britain’s wars in Malaya and Palestine, and America’s war in Vietnam. It too was nourished by the RAND Corporation, which was one of the first to see the potential of what the French commander Roger Trinquier called “modern warfare” or the “French view of counterinsurgency.” It offered, in the words of one of its leading students, the historian Peter Paret, a vital counterweight “at the opposite end of the spectrum from rockets and the hydrogen bomb.” 2 Like nuclear-weapon strategy, the counterinsurgency model grew out of a [...] from rockets and the hydrogen bomb.” 2 Like nuclear-weapon strategy, the counterinsurgency model grew out of a combination of strategic game theory and systems theorizing; but unlike nuclear strategy, which was primarily a response to the Soviet Union, it developed more in response to another formidable game theorist, Mao Zedong. The formative moment for counterinsurgency theory was not the nuclear confrontation that characterized the Cuban Missile Crisis, but the earlier Chinese Civil War that led to Mao’s victory in 1949—essentially, when Mao turned guerrilla tactics into a revolutionary war that overthrew a political regime. The central methods and practices of counterinsurgency warfare were honed in response to Mao’s strategies and the ensuing anticolonial struggles in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa that imitated Mao’s approach. 3 Those struggles for independence were the breeding soil for the development and perfection of unconventional warfare. By the turn of the twentieth century, when President George W. Bush would [...] T HE COUNTERINSURGENCY MODEL CAN BE TRACED BACK through several different genealogies. One leads to British colonial rule in India and Southeast Asia, to the insurgencies there, and to the eventual British redeployment and modernization of counterinsurgency strategies in Northern Ireland and Britain at the height of the Irish Republican Army’s independence struggles. This first genealogy draws heavily on the writings of the British counterinsurgency theorist Sir Robert Thompson, the chief architect of Great Britain’s antiguerrilla strategies in Malaya from 1948 to 1959. Another genealogy traces back to the American colonial experience in the Philippines at the beginning of the twentieth century. Others lead back to Trotsky and Lenin in Russia, to Lawrence of Arabia during the Arab Revolt, or even to the Spanish uprising against Napoleon—all mentioned, at least briefly, in General Petraeus’s counterinsurgency field manual. Alternative genealogies reach back to the political theories of Montesquieu or John Stuart Mill, while some go even further to antiquity and to the works of Polybius, Herodotus, and Tacitus. 1 But the most direct antecedent of counterinsurgency warfare as embraced by the United States after 9/11 was the French military response in the late 1950s and 1960s to the anticolonial wars in Indochina and Algeria. This genealogy passes through three important figures—the historian Peter Paret and the French commanders David Galula and Roger Trinquier—and, through them, it traces back to Mao Zedong. It is Mao’s idea of the political nature of counterinsurgency that would prove so influential in the United States. Mao politicized warfare in a manner that would come back to haunt us today. The French connection also laid the seeds of a tension between brutality and legality that would plague counterinsurgency practices to the present—at least, until the United States discovered, or rediscovered, a way to resolve the tension by legalizing the brutality. [...] A founding principle of revolutionary insurgency—what Paret referred to as “the principal lesson” that Mao taught—was that “an inferior force could outpoint a modern army so long as it succeeded in gaining at least the tacit support of the population in the contested area.” 4 The core idea was that the military battle was less decisive than the political struggle over the loyalty and allegiance of the masses: the war is fought over the population or, in Mao’s words, “The army cannot exist without the people.” 5 As a result of this interdependence, the insurgents had to treat the general population well to gain its support. On this basis Mao formulated early on, in 1928, his “Eight Points of Attention” for army personnel: 1. Talk to people politely. 2. Observe fair dealing in all business transactions. 3. Return everything borrowed from the people. 4. Pay for anything damaged. 5. Do not beat or scold the people. 6. Do not damage crops. 7. Do not molest women. 8. Do not ill-treat prisoners-of-war. 6 Two other principles were central to Mao’s revolutionary doctrine: first, the importance of having a unified political and military power structure that consolidated, in the same hands, political and military considerations; and second, the importance of psychological warfare. More specifically, as Paret explained, “proper psychological measures could create and maintain ideological cohesion among fighters and their civilian supporters.” 7 Revolutionary warfare, in Paret’s view, boiled down to a simple equation: [...] the population.” 10 Of course, neither Paret nor other strategists were so naïve as to think that Mao invented guerrilla warfare. Paret spent much of his research tracing the antecedents and earlier experiments with insurgent and counterinsurgency warfare. “Civilians taking up arms and fighting as irregulars are as old as war,” Paret emphasized. Caesar had to deal with them in Gaul and Germania, the British in the American colonies or in South Africa with the Boers, Napoleon in Spain, and on and on. In fact, as Paret stressed, the very term “guerrilla” originated in the Spanish peasant resistance to Napoleon after the Spanish monarchy had fallen between 1808 and 1813. Paret developed case studies of the [...] But for purposes of describing the “guerre révolutionnaire” of the 1960s, the most pertinent and timely objects of study were Mao Zedong and the Chinese revolution. And on the basis of that particular conception of revolutionary war, Paret set forth a model of counterrevolutionary warfare. Drawing principally on French military practitioners and theorists, Paret delineated a three-pronged strategy focused on a mixture of intelligence gathering, psychological warfare on both the population and the subversives, and severe treatment of the rebels. In Guerrillas in the 1960’s, Paret reduced the tasks of “counterguerrilla action” to the following: 1. The military defeat of the guerrilla forces. 2. The separation of the guerrilla from the population. 3. The reestablishment of governmental authority and the development of a viable social order. 12 [...] interact.” 13 So the central task, according to Paret, was to attack the rebel’s popular support so that he would “lose his hold over the people, and be isolated from them.” There were different ways to accomplish this, from widely publicized military defeats and sophisticated psychological warfare to the resettlement of populations—in addition to other more coercive measures. But one rose above the others for Paret: to encourage the people to form progovernment militias and fight against the guerrillas. This approach had the most potential, Paret observes: “Once a substantial number of members of a community commit violence on [...] In sum, the French model of counterrevolutionary warfare, in Paret’s view, had to be understood as the inverse of revolutionary warfare. [...] The main sources for Paret’s synthesis were the writings and practices of French commanders on the ground, especially Roger Trinquier and David Galula, though there were others as well. 15 Trinquier, one of the first French commanders to theorize modern warfare based on his firsthand experience, had a [...] persisting in repeating its efforts.” Trinquier argues that this new form of modern warfare called for “an interlocking system of actions—political, economic, psychological, military,” grounded on “Countrywide Intelligence.” As Trinquier emphasizes, “since modern warfare asserts its presence on the totality of the population, we have to be everywhere informed.” Informed, in order to know and target the population and wipe out the insurgency. 17 The other leading counterinsurgency theorist, also with deep firsthand [...] time.’” 19 From Mao, Galula drew the central lesson that societies were divided into three groups and that the key to victory was to isolate and eradicate the active minority in order to gain the allegiance of the masses. Galula emphasizes in Counterinsurgency Warfare that the central strategy of counterinsurgency theory “simply expresses the basic tenet of the exercise of political power”: In any situation, whatever the cause, there will be an active minority for the cause, a neutral majority, and an active minority against the cause. [...] time.’” 19 From Mao, Galula drew the central lesson that societies were divided into three groups and that the key to victory was to isolate and eradicate the active minority in order to gain the allegiance of the masses. Galula emphasizes in Counterinsurgency Warfare that the central strategy of counterinsurgency theory “simply expresses the basic tenet of the exercise of political power”: In any situation, whatever the cause, there will be an active minority for the cause, a neutral majority, and an active minority against the cause. The technique of power consists in relying on the favorable minority in order to rally the neutral majority and to neutralize or eliminate the hostile minority.20 The battle was over the general population, Galula emphasized in his Counterinsurgency Warfare, and this tenet represented the key political dimension of a new warfare strategy. [...] US general David Petraeus picked up right where David Galula and Peter Paret left off. Widely recognized as the leading American thinker and practitioner of counterinsurgency theory—eventually responsible for all coalition troops in Iraq and the architect of the troop surge of 2007—General Petraeus would refine [...] On this political foundation, General Petraeus’s manual establishes three key pillars—what might be called counterinsurgency’s core principles. The first is that the most important struggle is over the population. In a short set of guidelines that accompanies his field manual, General Petraeus emphasizes: “The decisive terrain is the human terrain. The people are the center [...] The main battle, then, is over the populace. The second principle is that the allegiance of the masses can only be secured by separating the small revolutionary minority from the passive majority, and by isolating, containing, and ultimately eliminating the active minority. In his accompanying guidelines, General Petraeus emphasizes: “Seek out and eliminate those who threaten the population. Don’t let them intimidate the innocent. Target the whole network, not just individuals.” 25 The third core principle is that success turns on collecting information on everyone in the population. Total information is essential to properly distinguish friend from foe and then extract the revolutionary minority. It is intelligence— total information awareness—that renders the counterinsurgency possible. It is [...] paraphrasing the French commander, underscores the primacy of political factors in counterinsurgency. “General Chang Ting-chen of Mao Zedong’s central committee once stated that revolutionary war was 80 percent political action and only 20 percent military,” the manual reads. Then it warns: “At the beginning of a COIN operation, military actions may appear predominant as security forces conduct operations to secure the populace and kill or capture insurgents; however, political objectives must guide the military’s approach.” 27 Chapter Two opens with an epigraph from David Galula’s book: “Essential [...] General David Petraeus learned, but more importantly popularized, Mao Zedong’s central lesson: counterinsurgency warfare is political. It is a strategy for winning over the people. It is a strategy for governing. And it is quite telling that a work so indebted to Mao and midcentury French colonial thinkers would become so influential post-9/11. Petraeus’s manual contained a roadmap for a new paradigm of governing. As the fog lifts from 9/11, it is becoming increasingly clear what lasting impact Mao had on our government of self and others today. [...] D eveloped by military commanders and strategists over decades of anticolonial wars, counterinsurgency warfare was refined, deployed, and tested in the years following 9/11. Since then, the modern warfare paradigm has been distilled into a concise three-pronged strategy: 1. Bulk-collect all intelligence about everyone in the population—every piece of data and metadata available. (total information awareness) [...] 2. Identify and eradicate the revolutionary minority. Total information about everyone makes it possible to discriminate between friend and foe. Once suspicion attaches, individuals must be treated severely to extract all possible information, with enhanced interrogation techniques if necessary; and if they are revealed to belong to the active minority, they must be disposed of through detention, rendition, deportation, or drone strike—in other words, targeted assassination. Unlike conventional soldiers from the past, these insurgents are dangerous because of their [...] 3. Pacify the masses. The population must be distracted, entertained, satisfied, occupied, and most importantly, neutralized, or deradicalized if necessary, in order to ensure that the vast preponderance of ordinary individuals remain just that—ordinary. This third prong reflects the “population-centric” dimension of counterinsurgency theory. Remember, in this new way of seeing, the population is the battlefield. Its hearts and minds must be assured. In the digital age, this can be achieved, first, by targeting enhanced content (such as sermons by moderate imams) to deradicalize susceptible persons—in other words, by deploying new digital techniques of psychological warfare and propaganda. Second, by providing just the bare minimum in terms of welfare and humanitarian assistance—like rebuilding schools, distributing some cash, and bolstering certain government institutions. As General Petraeus’s field ### Torture and surveilance T HE ATTACK ON THE W ORLD T RADE C ENTER SHOWED THE weakness of American intelligence gathering. Top secret information obtained by one agency was silo’ed from others, making it impossible to aggregate intelligence and obtain a full picture of the security threats. The CIA knew that two of the 9/11 hijackers were on American soil in San Diego, but didn’t share the information with the FBI, who were actively trying to track them down. 1 September 11 was a crippling intelligence failure, and in the immediacy of that failure many in President George W. Bush’s administration felt the need to do something radical. Greater sharing of intelligence, naturally. But much more as well. Two main solutions were devised, or revived: total surveillance and tortured interrogations. They represent the first prong of the counterinsurgency approach. In effect, 9/11 set the stage both for total NSA surveillance and torture as forms of total information awareness. The former functioned at the most virtual or ethereal, or “digital” level, by creating the material for data-mining and analysis. The latter operated at the most bodily or physical, or “analog” level, obtaining information directly from suspects and detainees in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. But both satisfied the same goal: total information awareness, the first tactic of counterinsurgency warfare. Census What is clear, though—as I document in Exposed—is that the myriad NSA, FBI, CIA, and allied intelligence agencies produce total information, the first and most important prong of the counterinsurgency paradigm. Most important, because both of the other prongs depend on it. As the RAND Corporation notes in its lengthy 519-page report on the current state of counterinsurgency theory and practice, “Effective governance depends on knowing the population, demographically and individually.” The RAND report reminds us that this insight is not novel or new. The report then returns, pointedly for us, to Algeria and the French commander, David Galula: “Galula, in Counterinsurgency Warfare, argued that ‘control of the population begins with a thorough census. Every inhabitant must be registered and given a foolproof identity card.’” 5 [...] Today, that identity card is an IP address, a mobile phone, a digital device, facial recognition, and all our digital stamps. These new digital technologies have made everyone virtually transparent. And with our new ethos of selfies, tweets, Facebook, and Internet surfing, everyone is now exposed. Enhanced interrogation: Second, tortured interrogation. The dual personality of counterinsurgency warfare is nowhere more evident than in the intensive use of torture for information gathering by the United States immediately after 9/11. Fulfilling the first task of counterinsurgency theory—total surveillance—this practice married the most extreme form of brutality associated with modern warfare to the formality of legal process and the rule of law. The combination of inhumanity and legality was spectacular. In the days following 9/11, many in the Bush administration felt there was only one immediate way to address the information shortfall, namely, to engage in “enhanced interrogation” of captured suspected terrorists—another euphemism for torture. Of course, torture of captured suspects would not fix the problem of silo’ed information, but they thought it would at least provide immediate information of any pending attacks. One could say that the United States turned to torture because many in the administration believed the country did not have adequate intelligence capabilities, lacking the spy network or even the language abilities to infiltrate and conduct regular espionage on organizations like Al Qaeda. 6 The tortured interrogations combined the extremes of brutality with the Getting information or "truth" was not the only, perhaps not the main point of torture sessions, and maybe not as well the main point for mass surveillance: Even the more ordinary instances of “enhanced interrogation” were harrowing—and so often administered, according to the Senate report, after the interrogators believed there was no more information to be had, sometimes even before the detainee had the opportunity to speak. Torture template: Ramzi bin al-Shibh was subjected to this type of treatment immediately upon arrival in detention, even before being interrogated or given an opportunity to cooperate—in what would become a “template” for other detainees. Bin al- Shibh was subjected first to “sensory dislocation” including “shaving bin al- Shibh’s head and face, exposing him to loud noise in a white room with white lights, keeping him ‘unclothed and subjected to uncomfortably cool temperatures,’ and shackling him ‘hand and foot with arms outstretched over his head (with his feet firmly on the floor and not allowed to support his weight with his arms).’” Following that, the interrogation would include “attention grasp, walling, the facial hold, the facial slap… the abdominal slap, cramped confinement, wall standing, stress positions, sleep deprivation beyond 72 hours, and the waterboard, as appropriate to [bin al-Shibh’s] level of resistance.” 8 This template would be used on others—and served as a warning to all. The more extreme forms of torture were also accompanied by the promise of "Bigeard shrimp": The more extreme forms of torture were also accompanied by the promise of life-long solitary confinement or, in the case of death, cremation. Counterinsurgency torture in the past had often been linked to summary disappearances and executions. Under the Bush administration, it was tied to what one might call virtual disappearances. During the Algerian war, as noted already, the widespread use of brutal interrogation techniques meant that those who had been victimized—both the guilty and innocent—became dangerous in the eyes of the French military leadership. FLN members needed to be silenced, forever; but so did others who might be radicalized by the waterboarding or gégène. In Algeria, a simple solution was devised: the tortured would be thrown out from helicopters into the Mediterranean. They became les crevettes de Bigeard, after the notorious French general in Algeria, Marcel Bigeard: “Bigeard’s shrimp,” dumped into the sea, their feet in poured concrete—a technique the French military had apparently experimented with earlier in Indochina. [...] The CIA would devise a different solution in 2002: either torture the suspect accidentally to death and then cremate his body to avoid detection, or torture the suspect to the extreme and then ensure that he would never again talk to another human being. Abu Zubaydah received the latter treatment. Zubaydah had first been seized and interrogated at length by the FBI, had provided useful information, and was placed in isolation for forty-seven days, the FBI believing that he had no more valuable information. Then the CIA took over, believing he might still be a source. 10 The CIA turned to its more extreme forms of torture— utilizing all ten of its most brutal techniques—but, as a CIA cable from the interrogation team, dated July 15, 2002, records, they realized beforehand that it would either have to cover up the torture if death ensued or ensure that Zubaydah would never talk to another human being again in his lifetime. According to the Senate report, “the cable stated that if Abu Zubaydah were to die during the interrogation, he would be cremated. The interrogation team closed the cable by stating: ‘regardless which [disposition] option we follow however, and especially in light of the planned psychological pressure techniques to be implemented, we need to get reasonable assurances that [Abu Zubaydah] will remain in isolation and incommunicado for the remainder of his life.’” 11 In response to this request for assurance, a cable from the CIA station gave the interrogation team those assurances, noting that “it was correct in its ‘understanding that the interrogation process takes precedence over preventative medical procedures,’” and then adding in the cable: KUBARK routines were approved at the uppermost level of the US government, by the president of the United States and his closest advisers. These practices were put in place, designed carefully and legally—very legalistically, in fact—to be used on suspected enemies. They were not an aberration. There are, to be sure, long histories written of rogue intelligence services using unauthorized techniques; there is a lengthy record, as well, of CIA ingenuity and creativity in this domain, including, among other examples, the 1963 KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual. 13 But after 9/11, the blueprint was drawn at the White House and the Pentagon, and it became official US policy—deliberate, debated, well-thought-out, and adopted as legal measures. [...] The Janus face of torture was its formal legality amidst its shocking brutality. Many of the country’s best lawyers and legal scholars, professors at top-ranked law schools, top government attorneys, and later federal judges would pore over statutes and case law to find legal maneuvers to permit torture. The felt need to legitimate and legalize the brutality—and of course, to protect the officials and operatives from later litigation—was remarkable. The documents known collectively as the “torture memos” fell into two categories: first, those legal memos regarding whether the Guantánamo detainees were entitled to POW status under the Geneva Conventions (GPW), written between September 25, 2001, and August 1, 2002; and second, starting in August 2002, the legal memos regarding whether the “enhanced interrogation techniques” envisaged by the CIA amounted to torture prohibited under international law. How torture was defined to allow torture to happen: As Jay Bybee, then at the Office of Legal Counsel and now a federal judge, wrote in his August 1, 2002, memo: We conclude that torture as defined in and proscribed by [18 US Code] Sections 2340-2340A, covers only extreme acts. Severe pain is generally of the kind difficult for the victim to endure. Where the pain is physical, it must be of an intensity akin to that which accompanies serious physical injury such as death or organ failure. Severe mental pain requires suffering not just at the moment of infliction but also requires lasting psychological harm, such as seen in mental disorders like post-traumatic stress disorder. […] Because the acts inflicting torture are extreme, there is significant range of acts that though they might constitute cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment fail to rise to the level of torture.22 This definition of torture was so demanding that it excluded the brutal practices that the United States was using. It set the federal legal standard, essentially, at death or organ failure. [...] them 26 —and then, effectively, judicial opinions. The executive branch became a minijudiciary, with no effective oversight or judicial review. And in the end, it worked. The men who wrote these memos have never been prosecuted nor seriously taken to task, as a legal matter, for their actions. The American people allowed a quasi-judiciary to function autonomously, during and after. These self- appointed judges wrote the legal briefs, rendered judgment, and wrote the judicial opinions that legitimized these brutal counterinsurgency practices. In the process, they rendered the counterinsurgency fully legal. They inscribed torture within the fabric of law. One could go further. The torture memos accomplished a new resolution of the tension between brutality and legality, one that we had not witnessed previously in history. It was an audacious quasi-judicial legality that had rarely been seen before. And by legalizing torture in that way, the Bush administration provided a legal infrastructure for counterinsurgency-as-governance more broadly. [...] And through this process of legalization, these broader torturous practices spilled over into the second prong of counterinsurgency: the eradication of an active minority. Torture began to function as a way to isolate, punish, and eliminate those suspected of being insurgents. Bare existence, indefinite detention, incommunication: The indefinite detention and brutal ordinary measures served as a way to eliminate these men—captured in the field or traded for reward monies, almost like slaves from yonder. The incommunicado confinement itself satisfied the second prong of counterinsurgency theory. 5 But somehow it also reached further than mere detention, approximating a form of disappearance or virtual death. The conditions these men found themselves in were so extreme, it is almost as if they were as good as dead. Reading Slahi’s numbing descriptions, one cannot help but agree with the philosopher Giorgio Agamben that these men at Guantánamo were, in his words, no more than “bare life.” 6 Agamben’s concept of bare existence captures well the dimensions of dehumanization and degradation that characterized their lives: the camp inmates were reduced to nothing more than bare animal existence. They were no longer human, but things that lived. The indefinite detention and torture at Guantánamo achieved an utter denial of their humanity. Every aspect of their treatment at black sites and detention facilities ### Drone strikes This debate between more population-centric proponents and more enemy- centric advocates of counterinsurgency should sound familiar. It replays the controversy over the use of torture or other contested methods within the counterinsurgency paradigm. It replicates the strategic debates between the ruthless and the more decent. It rehearses the tensions between Roger Trinquier and David Galula. Yet just as torture is central to certain versions of modern warfare, the drone strike too is just as important to certain variations of the counterinsurgency approach. Drone strikes, in effect, can serve practically all the functions of the second prong of counterinsurgency warfare. Drone strikes eliminate the identified active minority. They instill terror among everyone living near the active minority, dissuading them and anyone else who might contemplate joining the revolutionaries. They project power and infinite capability. They show who has technological superiority. As one Air Force officer says, “The real advantage of unmanned aerial systems is that they allow you to project power without projecting vulnerability.” 18 By terrifying and projecting power, drones dissuade the population from joining the insurgents. [...] Covered extensively by the news media, drone attacks are popularly believed to have caused even more civilian casualties than is actually the case. The persistence of these attacks on Pakistani territory offends people’s deepest sensibilities, alienates them from their government, and contributes to Pakistan’s instability.” 19 In July 2016, the Obama administration released a report estimating the [...] Those in the affected countries typically receive far higher casualty reports. The Pakistan press, for instance, reported that there are about 50 civilians killed for every militant assassinated, resulting in a hit rate of about 2 percent. As Kilcullen and Exum argue, regardless of the exact number, “every one of these dead noncombatants represents an alienated family, a new desire for revenge, and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially even as drone strikes have increased.” 25 To those living in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and neighboring countries, the Predator drones are terrifying. But again—and this is precisely the central tension at the heart of counterinsurgency theory—the terror may be a productive tool for modern warfare. It may dissuade people from joining the active minority. It may convince some insurgents to abandon their efforts. Terror, as we have seen, is by no means antithetical to the counterinsurgency paradigm. Some would argue it is a necessary means. Drones are by no means a flawless weapons system even for their proponents. [...] Regarding the first question, a drone should be understood as a blended weapons system, one that ultimately functions at several levels. It shares characteristics of the German V-2 missile, to be sure, but also the French guillotine and American lethal injection. It combines safety for the attacker, with relatively precise but rapid death, and a certain anesthetizing effect—as well as, of course, utter terror. For the country administering the drone attack, it is perfectly secure. There is no risk of domestic casualties. In its rapid and apparently surgical death, it can be portrayed, like the guillotine, as almost humane. And drones have had a numbing effect on popular opinion precisely because of their purported precision and hygiene—like lethal injection has done, for the most part, in the death-penalty context. Plus, drones are practically invisible and out of sight—again, for the country using them—though, again, terrifying for the targeted communities. [...] Chamayou’s second question is, perhaps, the most important. This new weapons system has changed the US government’s relationship to its own citizens. There is no better evidence of this than the deliberate, targeted drone killing of US and allied nation citizens abroad—as we will see. 32 [...] An analogy from the death penalty may be helpful. There too, the means employed affect the ethical dimensions of the practice itself. The gas chamber and the electric chair—both used in the United States even after the Holocaust— became fraught with meaning. Their symbolism soured public opinion on the death penalty. By contrast, the clinical or medical nature of lethal injection at first reduced the political controversy surrounding executions. Only over time, with botched lethal injections and questions surrounding the drug cocktails and their true effects, have there been more questions raised. But it has taken time for the negative publicity to catch up with lethal injection. Drones, at this point, remain far less fraught than conventional targeted assassinations. ### Winning hearts and minds THE THIRD PRONG OF COUNTERINSURGENCY THEORY CONSISTS in winning the hearts and minds of the general population to stem the flow of new recruits to the active minority and to seize the upper hand in the struggle. This goal can be achieved by actively winning the allegiance of the population, or by pacifying an already passive population, or even simply by distracting the masses. The bar, ultimately, is low since, on the counterinsurgency view, the people are mostly passive. As Roger Trinquier noted in 1961, “Experience has demonstrated that it is by no means necessary to enjoy the sympathy of the majority of the people to obtain their backing; most are amorphous, indifferent.” Or, as General Petraeus’s manual states, the vast majority is “neutral” and “passive”; it represents an “uncommitted middle” with “passive supporters of both sides.” 1 The third prong, then, is aimed mostly at assuaging, pacifying perhaps, or merely distracting the indifferent masses. [...] the third prong has translated, principally, into three tactics: investments in infrastructure, new forms of digital propaganda, and generalized terror. [...] Undergirding them both, though, is the third tactic, the threat of generalized terror, that serves as a foundational method and looming constant. [...] In How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything, Rosa Brooks writes that since 9/11 we have witnessed the expansion of the military and its encroachment on civilian affairs. “We’ve seen,” in her words, “the steady militarization of US foreign policy as our military has been assigned many of the tasks once given to civilian institutions.” Brooks warns us of a new world where “the boundaries between war and nonwar, military and nonmilitary have eroded.” [...] We are indeed facing, as Brooks powerfully demonstrates, a new world of an ever-encroaching military. But what this reveals, more than anything, is the rise of the counterinsurgency paradigm of government. It is the model of counterinsurgency warfare—of Galula’s early turn to building schools and health facilities, to focusing on the hearts and minds of the general population—that has pushed the military into these traditionally civilian domains, including total surveillance, rule-of-law projects, artificial intelligence, entertainment, etc. In effect, it is the counterinsurgency paradigm of government that has become everything, and everything that has become counterinsurgency. The blurring of boundaries between war and peaceful governance is not merely the contingent result of 9/11, it is instead the culmination of a long and deliberate process of modernizing warfare. Providing the basic needs: Providing basic necessities, labeled “essential services” in the field manual, is a key counterinsurgency practice. It consists primarily of ensuring that there is “food, water, clothing, shelter, and medical treatment” for the general population. General Petraeus’s manual explains the rationale in very simple terms: “People pursue essential needs until they are met, at any cost and from any source. People support the source that meets their needs. If it is an insurgent source, the population is likely to support the insurgency. If the [host nation] government provides reliable essential services, the population is more likely to support it. Commanders therefore identify who provides essential services to each group within the population.” 5 That, in most cases, involve funneling american taxpayer's money to enrich corporations with "insane profit margins" for rebuilding countries along with US guidelines. See Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine for more details. A second approach to securing the neutrality of the majority is more psychological. In the early days of modern warfare, examples of this approach included measures such as the resettlement of populations, in the words of counterinsurgency experts, “to control them better and to block the insurgents’ support.” This is what the British did in Malaya, and the French in Algeria. Other examples included basic propaganda campaigns. 16 As time has gone by, new digital technologies have enabled new forms of psychological counterinsurgency warfare. One of the newest involves digital propaganda, reflected most recently in the Center for Global Engagement set up under the Obama administration in early 2016. Created with the objective to prevent the radicalization of vulnerable youth, the center adopted strategies pioneered by the giants of Silicon Valley—Google, Amazon, Netflix—and was originally funded at the level of about $20 million. It targeted susceptible persons suspected of easier radicalization and sent them enhanced and improved third-party content in order to try to dissuade them, subliminally, from radicalizing or joining ISIS. In the words of an investigative journalist, “The Obama administration is launching a stealth anti-Islamic State messaging campaign, delivered by proxies and targeted to individual would-be extremists, the same way Amazon or Google sends you shopping suggestions based on your online browsing history.” 17 Terror e tortura: The third set of measures was even more basic: terror. The most formidable way to win hearts and minds is to terrorize the local population to make sure they do not sympathize with or aid the active minority. [...] The brutality of counterinsurgency serves, of course, to gather information and eradicate the revolutionary minority. But it also aims higher and reaches further: its ambition, as General Aussaresses recognized well, is to terrorize the insurgents, to scare them to death, and to frighten the local population in order to prevent them from joining the insurgent faction. Today, the use of unusually brutal torture, the targeted drone assassination of high-value suspects, and the indefinite detention under solitary conditions aim not only to eviscerate the enemy, but also to warn others, strike fear, and win their submission and obedience. Drones and indefinite detention crush those they touch, and strike [...] Terror, in the end, is a key component of the third core strategy of counterinsurgency. Torture and civilization: Since antiquity, terror has served to demarcate the civilized from the barbarian, to distinguish the free citizen from the enslaved. The free male in ancient Greece had the privilege of swearing an oath to the gods, of testifying on his word. The slave, by contrast, could only give testimony under torture. Torture, in this sense, defined freedom and citizenship by demeaning and marking—by imposing stigmata—on those who could be tortured. It served to demarcate the weak. It marked the vulnerable. And it also, paradoxically, served to delineate the “more civilized.” This is perhaps the greatest paradox of the brutality of counterinsurgency: to be civilized is to torture judiciously. This paradox was born in antiquity, but it journeys on. [...] The judicious administration of terror is the hallmark of civilization. To be civilized is to terrorize properly, judiciously, with restraint, according to the rules. Only the barbarians tortured savagely, viciously, unrestrainedly. The civilized, by contrast, knew how and when to tame torture, how to rein it terror, to apply it with judgment and discretion. Compared to the barbarians—the beheadings of ISIS is a modern case on point—we are tame and judicious, even when we torture, not like those barbarians. And since 9/11, the judicious use of terror has been a key US strategy. In the end, terror functions in myriad ways to win the hearts and minds of the masses under the counterinsurgency paradigm of governing. Terror in many levels of governing: Now, terror is not an unprecedented component of governing, even if its role in the counterinsurgency model may be uniquely constitutive. It has been with us since slavery in antiquity, through the many inquisitions, to the internment and concentration camps of modern history. And there too, in each of its manifestations, it functioned at multiple levels to bolster different modes of governing. Looking back through history, terror has done a lot of work. Today as well. And to see all that terror achieves today—above and beyond the three prongs of counterinsurgency theory—it is useful to look back through history and recall its different functions and the work it has done. The reflections today are stunning. Torture and truth: The first episode reaches back to antiquity, but represents a recurring theme throughout history: terror has often served to manufacture its own truth— especially in terms of its efficacy. “They all talk.” [...] [...] Trying to convince a suspect that he will talk, telling him that he will—this is, of course, a psychological technique, but it is more than that. It is also a firm belief of counterinsurgency theorists outside the interrogation room. Roger [...] Manufacturing truth: that is, perhaps, the first major function of terror. It is the power of terror, especially in the face of ordinary men and women, of humans, all too human. It has been that way since the inquisitions of the Middle Ages, and before, since antiquity. On this score, little has changed. In her book on slavery in Greek antiquity, Torture and Truth, Page duBois argues that the idea of truth dominant today in Western thought is indissolubly tied to the practice of torture, while torture itself is deeply connected to the will to discover something that is always beyond our grasp. As a result, society after society returns to torture, in almost an eternal recurrence, to seek out the truth that is always beyond our reach. In ancient times, duBois shows, torture functioned as the metaphorical touchstone of truth and as a means to establish a social hierarchy. In duBois’s words, “the desire to create an other and the desire to extract truth are inseparable, in that the other, because she or he is an other, is constituted as a source of truth.” Truth, in sum, is always “inextricably linked with the practice of torture.” 4 [...] Truth, duBois argues, “resides in the slave body.” 5 [...] Even more, terror produced social difference and hierarchy. The limits on torture in ancient societies served to define what it meant to be among those who could be tortured—what it meant to be a slave or to be free. In ancient times, the testimony of a slave could only be elicited, and only became admissible in litigation, under torture. Only free male citizens could take an oath or resolve a controversy by sermon. The rules about who could be tortured in ancient times did not just regulate the victims of torture, the rules themselves were constitutive of what it meant to be a slave. The laws demarcated and defined freedom itself —what it looked like, what it entailed. Sophocles’s tragedy Oedipus Rex has captured our imagination for centuries on questions of fate and power. But it is perhaps on the question of terror and truth that the play turns. At the climax of Sophocles’s tragedy—at the pivotal moment when truth finally emerges for all to see and to recognize—there is a scene of terror. The shepherd slave who held the knowledge of Oedipus’s ancestry is threatened with torture. And that threat of torture alone—at the culmination of a whole series of unsuccessful inquiries—produces the truth: torture provokes the shepherd’s confession and that allows Oedipus to recognize his fate. But more than that, torture reaffirms the social order in Thebes—a social order where gods rule, oracles tell truth, prophets divine, fateful kings govern, and slaves serve. It is, ultimately, the right to terrorize that reveals Oedipus’s power and the shepherd’s place in society. [...] In a similar way, terror today produces its own truth—about the effectiveness of torture in eliciting truth, about its effectiveness in subjugating the insurgents, about the justness of counterinsurgency. [...] Second, terror—or more specifically the regulatory framework that surrounds terror—legitimizes the practices of terror itself. This may sound paradoxical or circular—but it has often been true in history. The structures that frame and regulate the administration of terrorizing practices have the effect, unexpectedly, [...] The extreme nature of torture, once brought within the fabric of the law, concentrated power in the hands of those who had the knowledge and skill, the techne, to master the brutality. The Justinian codification served as a model to later codifications during the early Middle Ages and to the practices of the Inquisition. Extreme practices call for expert oversight and enable a concentration of [...] Torture was brought into the fabric of the law and rarified at the same time. The rarefication in the Medieval Period served a political end: to make torture even more foreboding. Had torture become too generalized or too frequent, it might have lost its exceptionality and terrorizing effect. Torture was rarely applied, and, as one historian notes, inflicted with “the [...] The rarity achieved by the limited use and legal regulation of torture in the Medieval Period served to ensure its persistence and role as a social epistemological device—as a producer of truths, especially truth about itself. Centuries later, the Bush administration and its top lawyers re-created a legal architecture surrounding the use of torture. [...] Third, the legal regulation of terror also legitimizes the larger political regime. [...] It may seem surprising or paradoxical that the antebellum courts would protect a slave accused of poisoning her master. But there is an explanation: the intricate legal framework surrounding the criminalization and punishment of errant slaves during the antebellum period served to maintain and stabilize chattel slavery in the South—it served to equilibrate the political economy of slavery. It served to balance interests in such a way that neither the slave owners nor the slaves would push the whole system of slavery into disarray. And the courts and politicians carefully handled this delicate balance. [...] In fact, the financial loss associated with the execution of a slave was viewed as the only way to guarantee that owners made sure their slaves received a fair trial. During the 1842–1843 legislative session, the general assembly passed a [...] These complex negotiations over the criminal rules accompanied the practices of slavery in Alabama—a form of terror—and served to legitimize the larger political economy of chattel slavery. They offered stability to the slave economy by making the different participants in the criminal process and in slavery—the slave owners, the foremen, the magistrates, and the public at large —more confident in the whole enterprise. The extensive legal regulation of the torture of slaves was not about justifying torture, nor about resolving philosophical or ethical questions. Instead, it served to strike a balance and stabilize the institution of slavery. [...] Fourth, the ability to terrorize—and to get away with it—has a powerful effect on others. The audacity and the mastery impress the general masses. Something about winning or beating others seduces the population. People like winners, and winning is inscribed in terrorizing others. Masculinity: Fifth, and relatedly, terror is gendered, which also tends to reinforce the power and appeal of the more brutal counterinsurgency practices. Brutality is most often associated with the dominant half of the couple, the one who controls, and however much we might protest, this tends to strengthen the attraction. Horrorism: Terror works in other ways as well, and many other historical episodes could shed light on the complex functioning of terror today—of what Adriana Cavarero refers to as “horrorism.” 45 Terror, for instance, operates to control and manage one’s comrades. It can serve to keep the counterrevolutionary minority in check. The willingness to engage in extreme forms of brutality, in senseless violence, in irrational excess signals one’s own ruthlessness to one’s peers or inferiors. It can frighten and discipline both inferiors and superiors. It demonstrates one’s willingness to be cruel—which can be productive, in fact necessary, to a counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgency goes domestic: The operations of COINTELPRO—the Counter Intelligence Program developed by the FBI in the 1950s to disrupt the American Communist Party, and extended into the 1960s to eradicate the Black Panthers—took precisely the form of counterinsurgency warfare. The notorious August 1967 directive of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters”; 16 the police raids on Black Panther headquarters in 1968 and 1969; the summary execution of the charismatic chairman of the Chicago Black Panther Party, Fred Hampton; the first SWAT operations carried out against the Panthers in Los Angeles—these all had the trappings of modern warfare. Hoover’s FBI targeted the Panthers in a manner that drew on the foundational principles of counterinsurgency: first, to collect as much intelligence on the Black Panther Party as possible through the use of FBI informants and total surveillance; second, to isolate the Panthers from their communities by making their lives individually so burdened with surveillance and so difficult that they were forced to separate themselves from their friends and family members; third, to turn the Panther movement into one that was perceived, by the general population, as a radicalized extremist organization, as a way to delegitimize the Panthers and reduce their appeal and influence; and ultimately, to eliminate and eradicate them, initially through police arrests, then through criminal prosecutions (for instance, of the New York 21) and justified homicides [...] and ultimately by fomenting conflict and divisiveness within the party [...] The linchpin of a domesticated counterinsurgency is to bring total information awareness home. Just as it was developed abroad, it is total surveillance alone that makes it possible to distinguish the active minority on domestic soil from the passive masses of Americans. A fully transparent population is the first requisite of the counterinsurgency method. In General Petraeus’s field manual, it received a full chapter early on, “Intelligence in Counterinsurgency,” with a pithy and poignant epigraph: “Everything good that happens seems to come from good intelligence.” And as the manual began, so it ended, with the following simple mantra: “The ultimate success or failure of the [counterinsurgency] mission depends on the effectiveness of the intelligence effort." [...] American is a potential insurgent. Constant vigilance of the American population is necessary—hand in hand with the appearance of trust. Appearances are vital. A domesticated counterinsurgency must suspect everyone in the population, but not let it be known. This posture, developed in counterinsurgency theory decades ago, was at the core of the paradigm. David Galula had refined it to a witty statement he would tell his soldiers in Algeria: “One cannot catch a fly with vinegar. My rules are: outwardly you must treat every civilian as a friend; inwardly you must consider him as a rebel ally until you have positive proof to the contrary.” 2 This mantra has become the rule today—at home. [...] In Exposed, I proposed a new way to understand how power circulates in the digital age and, especially, a new way to comprehend our willingness to expose ourselves to private corporations and the government alike. The metaphors commonly used to describe our digital condition, such as the “surveillance state,” Michel Foucault’s panopticon prison, or even George Orwell’s Big Brother, are inadequate, I argued there. In the new digital age we are not forcibly imprisoned in panoptic cells. There is no “telescreen” anchored to the wall of our apartments by the state. No one is trying to crush our passions, or wear us down into submission with the smell of boiled cabbage and old rag mats, coarse soap, and blunt razors. The goal is not to displace our pleasures with hatred—with “hate” sessions, “hate songs,” “hate weeks.” Today, instead, we interact by means of “likes,” “shares,” “favorites,” “friending,” and “following.” We gleefully hang smart TVs on the wall that record everything we say and all our preferences. The drab uniforms and grim grayness of Orwell’s 1984 have been replaced by the iPhone 5c in its radiant pink, yellow, blue, and green. “Colorful through and through,” its marketing slogan promises, and the desire for color- filled objects—for the sensual swoosh of a sent e-mail, the seductive click of the iPhone camera “shutter,” and the “likes,” clicks, and hearts that can be earned by sharing—seduce us into delivering ourselves to the surveillance technologies. And as the monitoring and marketing of our private lives changes who we sharing—seduce us into delivering ourselves to the surveillance technologies. And as the monitoring and marketing of our private lives changes who we are, power circulates in a new way. Orwell depicted the perfect totalitarian society. Guy Debord described ours rather as a society of the spectacle, in which the image makers shape how we understand the world and ourselves. Michel Foucault spoke instead of “the punitive society” or what he called “panopticism,” drawing on Jeremy Bentham’s design of the panoptic prison. Gilles Deleuze went somewhat further and described what he called “societies of control.” But in our digital age, total surveillance has become inextricably linked with pleasure. We live in a society of exposure and exhibition, an expository society. [...] And that’s what happened: taxpayers would pay the telecoms to hold the data for the government. So, before, AT&T surreptitiously provided our private personal digital data to the intelligence services free of charge. Now, American taxpayers will pay them to collect and hold on to the data for when the intelligence services need them. A neoliberal win-win solution for everyone— except, of course, the ordinary, tax-paying citizen who wants a modicum of privacy or protection from the counterinsurgency. [...] In my previous book, however, I failed to fully grasp how our expository society fits with the other features of our contemporary political condition— from torture, to Guantánamo, to drone strikes, to digital propaganda. In part, I could not get past the sharp contrast between the fluidity of our digital surfing and surveillance on the one hand, and the physicality of our military interventions and use of torture on the other. To be sure, I recognized the deadly reach of metadata and reiterated those ominous words of General Michael Hayden, former director of both the NSA and the CIA: “We kill people based on metadata.” 20 And I traced the haunting convergence of our digital existence and of correctional supervision: the way in which the Apple Watch begins to function like an electronic bracelet, seamlessly caging us into a steel mesh of digital traces. But I was incapable then of fully understanding the bond between digital exposure and analog torture. It is now clear, though, that the expository society fits seamlessly within our new paradigm of governing. The expository society is precisely what allows the counterinsurgency strategies to be applied so impeccably “at home” to the very people who invented modern warfare. The advent of the expository society, as well as the specific NSA surveillance programs, makes domestic total information awareness possible, and in turn lays the groundwork for the other two prongs of counterinsurgency in the domestic context. [...] This idea of an occupied territory, of a colony within a nation, resonates perfectly with what we have witnessed in terms of the domestication of the counterinsurgency. I would just push the logic further: we have not simply created an internal colony, we have turned the nation itself into a colony. We govern ourselves through modern counterinsurgency warfare as if the entire United States was now a colonial dominion like Algeria, Malaya, or Vietnam. [...] These incidents—large and small, but all devastating for those targeted—also serve another objective of the domesticated counterinsurgency: to make the rest of us feel safe and secure, to allow us to continue our lives unaffected, to avoid disrupting our consumption and enjoyment. They serve to reassure, and also, in demonizing a phantom minority, to bring us all together against the specter of the frightening and dangerous other. It makes us believe that there would be, lurking in the quiet suburbs of Dallas or Miami, dangerous insurgents—were it not for our government. And these effects feed into the third prong of a [...] We had seen earlier, within counterinsurgency theory, similar debates between population-centric and enemy-centric theorists. The enemy-centric approach tended to be the more brutal, but more focused. The population-centric favored the more legal and social-investment approaches. I argued then that they were just two facets of the same paradigm. Here the debate is between population-and/or-enemy-centric theories versus individual-centric theory. But here too, I would argue, this is a false dichotomy. Again, these are just two facets of the same thing: a counterinsurgency paradigm of warfare with three core strategies. Like the population-and/or-enemy-centric theories, individual-centric theory naturally entails both incapacitating the individual terrorist or insurgent—eliminating him and all of the active minority —and preventing or deterring his substitution or replacement. [...] But rather than buy into this dichotomy of counterinsurgency and leaner antiterrorism, what history shows instead is a growing convergence of the two models in the United States since the 1960s. Counterinsurgency and domestic antiterrorism efforts, entwined from the start, have converged over time. The individual incapacitation strategy meshes perfectly into the counterinsurgency approach. And it leads seamlessly from the domestication of the second prong of counterinsurgency to the domestication of the third. ### Distraction and diversion MANY OF US WILL NOT RECOGNIZE OURSELVES, OR A MERICA for that matter, in these dreadful episodes—in the waterboarding and targeted assassinations abroad or in the militarization of our police forces, in the infiltration of Muslim mosques and student groups or in the constant collection of our personal data at home. Many of us have no firsthand experience of these terrifying practices. Few of us actually read the full Senate torture report, and even fewer track drone strikes. Some of us do not even want to know of their existence. Most of us are blissfully ignorant—at least most of the time—of these counterinsurgency practices at home or abroad, and are consumed instead by the seductive distractions of our digital age. And that’s the way it is supposed to be. As counterinsurgency is domesticated, it is our hearts and minds that are daily being assuaged, numbed, pacified—and blissfully satisfied. We, the vast majority of us, are reassured daily: there are threats everywhere and color-coded terror alerts, but counterinsurgency strategies are protecting us. We are made to feel that everything’s under control, that the threat is exterior, that we can continue with our daily existence. Even more, that these counterinsurgency strategies will prevail. That our government is stronger and better equipped, prepared to do everything necessary to win, and will win. That the guardians are protecting us. The effort to win the hearts and minds of the passive American majority is the third aspect of the domestication of counterinsurgency practices—perhaps the most crucial component of all. And it is accomplished through a remarkable mixture of distraction, entertainment, pleasure, propaganda, and advertising— now rendered all so much more effective thanks to our rich digital world. In Rome, after the Republic, this was known as “bread and circus” for the masses. Today, it’s more like Facebook and Pokémon GO. We saw earlier how the expository society entices us to share all our personal data and how this feeds into the first prong of counterinsurgency—total information awareness. There is a flip side to this phenomenon: keeping us distracted. The exposure is so pleasurable and engaging that we are mostly kept content, with little need for a coordinated top-down effort to do so. We are entranced—absorbed in a fantastic world of digitally enhanced reality that is totally consuming, engrossing, and captivating. We are no longer being rendered docile in a disciplinarian way, as Michel Foucault argued in Discipline and Punish. We are past notions of docility. We are actively entranced—not passively, not in a docile way. We are actively clicking and swiping, jumping from one screen to another, checking one platform then another to find the next fix—Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, YouTube, and on and on. Winning over and assuaging the passive majority might be accomplished— indeed, has been accomplished in the past—through traditional propaganda, such as broadcast misinformation about the insurgent minority, and through the top- down provision of entertainment to keep us from thinking about politics. The new digital world we live in has rendered these older strategies obsolete. As the counterinsurgency’s mandate to pacify the masses has been turned on the American people, the third prong of modern warfare looks and works differently than it did in previous times and in other places. Things have changed. Just a few years ago, our politicians still had to tell us [...] Pokémon GO has already run its course, but that is to be expected. Another digital obsession will follow. These platforms are supposed to capture all of our attention for a while, to captivate us, to distract us—and simultaneously to make us expose ourselves and everything around us. This is the symbiosis between the third and first prongs of the domesticated counterinsurgency: while it pacifies us, a game like Pokémon GO taps into all our personal information and captures all our data. At first, the game required that players share all their personal contacts. Although that was eventually dropped, the game collects all our GPS locations, captures all the video of our surroundings in perfectly GPS-coded data, and tracks us wherever we are. Plus, even though it is free, many players are buying add-ons and in the process sharing their consumption and financial data. The more we play, the more we are distracted and pacified, and the more we reveal about ourselves. [...] The distractions are everywhere: e-mail notifications, texts, bings and pings, new snapchats and instagrams. The entertainment is everywhere as well: free Wi-Fi at Starbucks and McDonald’s, and now on New York City streets, that allow us to stream music videos and watch YouTube videos. And of course, the advertising is everywhere, trying to make us consume more, buy online, subscribe, and believe. Believe not only that we need to buy the recommended book or watch the suggested Netflix, but also believe that we are secure and safe, protected by the most powerful intelligence agencies and most tenacious military force. Believe that we can continue to mind our own business—and remain distracted and absorbed in the digital world—because our government is watching out for us. The fact is, the domestication of counterinsurgency has coincided with the explosion of this digital world and its distractions. There is a real qualitative difference between the immediate post–9/11 period and today. One that is feeding directly into the third strategy of modern warfare. Meanwhile, for the more vulnerable—those who are more likely to veer astray and perhaps sympathize with the purported internal enemy—the same digital technologies target them for enhanced propaganda. The Global Engagement Center, or its equivalents, will profile them and send improved content from more moderate voices. The very same methods developed by the most tech-savvy retailers and digital advertisers—by Google and Amazon—are deployed to predict, identify, enhance, and target our own citizens. were before or that we are experiencing a waning of civil and political engagement. While I agree that the growing capacity of the state and corporations to monitor citizens may well threaten the private sphere, I am not convinced that this is producing new apathy or passivity or docility among citizens, so much as a new form of entrancement. The point is, we were once kept apathetic through other means, but are now kept apathetic through digital distractions. Voting turnout and Trump election: The voting patterns of American registered voters has remained constant— and apathetic—for at least fifty years. Even in the most important presidential elections, voter turnout in this country over the past fifty years or more has pretty much fluctuated between 50 percent and 63 percent. By any measure, American democracy has been pretty docile for a long time. In fact, if you look over the longer term, turnout has been essentially constant since the 1920s and the extension of the suffrage to women. Of course, turnout to vote is not the only measure of democratic participation, but it is one quantifiable measure. And electoral voting is one of the more reliable longitudinal measures of civic participation. But our record, in the United States, is not impressive. [...] Despite all this, over 62 million people voted for Donald Trump, resulting in his Electoral College victory. And it was by no means an unusual election. Voter turnout in 2016 was typical for this country. About 60.2 percent of the approximately 231 million eligible voters turned out to vote, representing about 139 million votes case. That number is consonant with historical turnout in this country, almost squarely between voter turnout in 2012 (58.6 percent) and in 2008 (61.6 percent), but still above most presidential election year turnouts since 1972. 16 In all categories of white voters, Trump prevailed. [...] The cable news network CNN captured this best in a pithy lead to a story titled “Trump: The Social Media President?”: “FDR was the first ‘radio’ president. JFK emerged as the first ‘television’ president. Barack Obama broke through as the first ‘Internet’ president. Next up? Prepare to meet Donald Trump, possibly the first ‘social media’ and ‘reality TV’ president.” 10 [...] This new mode of existence and digital consumption pleases and distracts the majority of Americans. The old-fashioned TV has now been enhanced and augmented, displaced by social media on digital devices of all sorts and sizes— from the Apple Watch and tablet, through the MacBook Air and Mac Pro, to the giant screen TV and even the Jumbotron. And all of it serves to pacify the masses and ensure that they do not have the time or attention span to question the domestication of the counterinsurgency. And, then, it all feeds back into total information awareness. Hand in hand, government agencies, social media, Silicon Valley, and large retailers and corporations have created a mesmerizing new digital age that simultaneously makes us expose ourselves and everything we do to government surveillance and that serves to distract and entertain us. All kinds of social media and reality TV consume and divert our attention, making us give our data away for free. A profusion of addictive digital platforms—from Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter, to YouTube and Netflix, Amazon Prime, Instagram, and Snapchat, and now Pokémon GO—distract us into exposing all our most private information, in order to feed the new algorithms of commerce and intelligence services: to profile us for both watch lists and commercial advertising. This is compatible with Shoshana Zuboff's Dispossession Cycle: This third aspect of counterinsurgency’s domestication is perhaps the most important, because it targets the most prized military and political objective: the general masses. And today, in the expository society, the new algorithms and digital-advertising methods have propelled the manipulation and propaganda to new heights. We are being encouraged by government and enticed by multination corporations and social media to expose and express ourselves as much as possible, leaving digital traces that permit both government and corporations to profile us and then try to shape us accordingly. To make model citizens out of us all—which means docile, entranced consumers. The governing paradigm here is to frenetically encourage digital activity—which in one sense is the opposite of docility—in order to then channel that activity in the right direction: consumption, political passivity, and avoiding the radical extremes. What we are witnessing is a new form of digital entrancement that shapes us as subjects, blunts our criticality, distracts us, and pacifies us. We spend so much time on our phones and devices, we barely have any time left for school or work, let alone political activism. In the end, the proper way to think about this all is not through the lens of docility, but through the framework of entrancement. It is crucial to understand this in the proper way, because breaking this very entrancement is key to seeing how counterinsurgency governance operates more broadly. Also, because the focus on docility—along an older register of discipline—is likely to lead us into an outdated focus on top-down propaganda. ### Counterrevolution The paradigm was refined and systematized, and has now reached a new stage: the complete and systematic domestication of counterinsurgency against a home population where there is no real insurgency or active minority. This new stage is what I call “The Counterrevolution.” The Counterrevolution is a new paradigm of governing our own citizens at home, modeled on colonial counterinsurgency warfare, despite the absence of any domestic uprising. It is aimed not against a rebel minority—since none really exists in the United States—but instead it creates the illusion of an active minority which it can then deploy to target particular groups and communities, and govern the entire American population on the basis of a counterinsurgency warfare model. It operates through the three main strategies at the heart of modern warfare, which, as applied to the American people, can be recapitulated as follows: 1. Total information awareness of the entire American population…: [by the] [...] “counterrevolutionary minority.” [...] 2. … in order to extract an active minority at home… Shock and Awe: 3. … and win the hearts and minds of Americans: Meanwhile, the counterrevolutionary minority works to pacify and assuage the general population in order to ensure that the vast majority of Americans remain just that: ordinary consuming Americans. They encourage and promote a rich new digital environment filled with YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime, tweets, Facebook posts, instagrams, snapchats, and reality TV that consume attention while digitally gathering personal data—and at times, pushing enhanced content. They direct digital propaganda to susceptible users. And they shock and awe the masses with their willingness to torture suspected terrorists or kill their own citizens abroad. In the end, entertaining, distracting, entrancing, and assuaging the general population is the key to success—our new form of bread and circus. The "new shape" of the State (and it's partners), as a "loose network": These three key strategies now guide governance at home, as they do military and foreign affairs abroad. What has emerged today is a new and different art of governing. It forms a coherent whole with, at its center, a security apparatus composed of White House, Pentagon, and intelligence officials, high-ranking congressional members, FISC judges, security and Internet leaders, police intelligence divisions, social-media companies, Silicon Valley executives, and multinational corporations. This loose network, which collaborates at times and competes at others, exerts control by collecting and mining our digital data. Data control has become the primary battlefield, and data, the primary resource— perhaps the most important primary resource in the United States today. [...] This new mode of governing has no time horizon. It has no sunset provision. And it is marked by a tyrannous logic of violence. [...] It is part and parcel of the new paradigm of governing that reconciles brutality with legality. The unprecedented, self-fulfilling profecy: We govern ourselves differently in the United States now: no longer through sweeping social programs like the New Deal or the War on Poverty, but through surgical counterinsurgency strategies against a phantom opponent. The intensity of the domestication now is unprecedented. [...] Counterinsurgency, with its tripartite scheme (active minority, passive masses, counterrevolutionary minority) and its tripartite strategy (total awareness, eliminate the active minority, pacify the masses) is a deeply counterproductive self-fulfilling prophecy that radicalizes individuals against the United States. [...] “The Islamic State has called it ‘the blessed ban’ because it supports the Islamic State’s position that America hates Islam. The clause in the order that gives Christians preferential treatment will be seen as confirming the Islamic State’s apocalyptic narrative that Islam is in a fight to the death against the Christian crusaders. The images of Muslim visitors being turned away at American airports will only inflame those who seek to do us harm.” 6 [...] We are headed not, as Kant would have it, toward perpetual peace, but instead, sounding the refrain of Nietzsche’s eternal return, toward an endless state of counterinsurgency warfare. ### Not exactly a state of exception, but of legality MANY COMMENTATORS ARGUE THAT WE NOW LIVE, IN THE United States and in the West more broadly, in a “state of exception” characterized by suspended legality. In this view, our political leaders have placed a temporary hold on the rule of law, with the tacit understanding that they will resume their adherence to liberal legal values when the political situation stabilizes. Some commentators go further, arguing that we have now entered a “permanent state of exception.” This view, however, misperceives one particular tactic of counterinsurgency —namely, the state of emergency—for the broader rationality of our new political regime. It fails to capture the larger ambition of our new mode of governing. The fact is, our government does everything possible to legalize its counterinsurgency measures and to place them solidly within the rule of law— through endless consultations with government lawyers, hypertechnical legal arguments, and lengthy legal memos. The idea is not to put law on hold, not even temporarily. It is not to create an exception, literally or figuratively. On the contrary, the central animating idea is to turn the counterinsurgency model into a fully legal strategy. So, the governing paradigm is not one of exceptionality, but of counterinsurgency and legality. [...] The logic today is based on a model of counterinsurgency warfare with, at its heart, the resolution of that central tension between brutality and legality. The counterrevolutionary model has resolved the inherited tension and legalized the brutality. [...] Agamben’s idea of a permanent state of exception pushes this further, but simultaneously undermines the defining element of the exception, since it becomes the rule. For the most part, though, the state of exception is presented as aberrational but temporary. [...] The problem with the state-of-exception view is that it mistakes tactics for the overarching logic of our new paradigm of governing and, in the process, fails to see the broader framework of The Counterrevolution. The state-of-exception framework rests on an illusory dichotomy between rule and exception, a myth that idealizes and reifies the rule of law. The point is, the use of torture at CIA black sites and the bulk collection of American telephony metadata were not exceptions to the rule of law, but were rendered fully legalized and regulated practices—firmly embedded in a web of legal memos, preauthorized formalities, and judicial or quasi-judicial oversight. In this sense, hardly anything that occurred was outside or exceptional to the law, or could not be brought back in. The Counterrevolution, unlike the state of exception, does not function on a binary logic of rule and exception, but on a fully coherent systematic logic of counterinsurgency that is pervasive, expansive, and permanent. It does not have limits or boundaries. It does not exist in a space outside the rule of law. It is all encompassing, systematic, and legalized. Of course, the rhetoric of “exception” is extremely useful to The Counterrevolution. “States of emergency” are often deployed to seize control over a crisis and to accelerate the three prongs of counterinsurgency. [...] The ultimate exercise of power, Foucault argued, is precisely to transform ambiguities about illegalisms into conduct that is “illegal.” [...] During the ancien régime, Foucault argues, the popular and the privileged classes worked together to evade royal regulations, fees, and impositions. Illegalisms were widespread throughout the eighteenth century and well distributed across the different strata of society [...] As wealth became increasingly mobile after the French Revolution, new forms of wealth accumulation—of moveable goods, stocks, and supplies as opposed to landed wealth—exposed massive amounts of chattel property to the workers who came in direct contact with this new commercial wealth. The accumulation of wealth began to make popular illegalisms less useful—even dangerous—to the interests of the privileged. The commercial class seized the mechanisms of criminal justice to put an end to these popular illegalisms [...] The privileged seized the administrative and police apparatus of the late eighteenth century to crack down on popular illegalisms. [...] They effectively turned popular illegalisms into illegalities, and, in the process, created the notion of the criminal as social enemy—Foucault even talks here of creating an “internal enemy.” [...] In The Counterrevolution—by contrast to the bourgeois revolutions of the early nineteenth century—the process is turned on its head. Illegalisms and illegalities are inverted. Rather than the privileged turning popular illegalisms into illegalities, the guardians are turning their own illegalisms into legalities. [...] The strategy here is to paper one’s way into the legal realm through elaborate memorandums and advice letters that justify the use of enhanced interrogation or the assassination of American citizens abroad. [...] On the one hand, there is a strict division of responsibilities: the intelligence agencies and the military determine all the facts outside the scope of the legal memorandum. [...] Everything is compartmentalized. [...] On the other hand, the memo authorizes: it allows the political authority to function within the bounds of the law. It sanitizes the political decision. It cleans the hands of the military and political leaders. It produces legalities. A circular, feedback loop: None of this violates the rule of law or transgresses the boundaries of legal liberalism. Instead, the change was rendered “legal.” If this feels circular, it is because it is: there is a constant feedback effect in play here. The counterinsurgency practices were rendered legal, and simultaneously justice was made to conform to the counterinsurgency paradigm. The result of the feedback loop was constantly new and evolving meanings of due process. And however rogue they may feel, they had gone through the correct procedural steps of due process to render them fully lawful and fully compliant with the rule of law. [...] “Abnormal,” in 1975, Foucault explored how the clash between the juridical power to punish and the psychiatric thirst for knowledge produced new medical diagnoses that then did work. [...] In his 1978 lecture on the invention of the notion of dangerousness in French psychiatry, Foucault showed how the idea of future dangerousness emerged from the gaps and tensions in nineteenth-century law. 37 [...] There are surely gaps here too in The Counterrevolution—tensions between rule-boundedness on the one hand and a violent warfare model on the other. Those tensions give momentum to the pendulum swings of brutality that are then resolved by bureaucratic legal memos. ### System analysis and Operations Research The RAND Corporation played a seminal role in the development of counterinsurgency practices in the United States and championed for decades— and still does—a systems-analytic approach that has come to dominate military strategy. Under its influence, The Counterrevolution has evolved into a logical and coherent system that regulates and adjusts itself, a fully reasoned and comprehensive approach. [...] Systems analysis was often confused with OR, but it was distinct in several regards. OR tended to have more elaborate mathematical models and solved lower-level problems; in systems analysis, by contrast, the pure mathematical computation was generally applied only to subparts of the overall problem. Moreover, SA took on larger strategic questions that implicated choices between major policy options. In this sense, SA was, from its inception, in the words of one study, “less quantitative in method and more oriented toward the analysis of broad strategic and policy questions, […] particularly […] seeking to clarify choice under conditions of great uncertainty.” 5 [...] As this definition made clear, there were two meanings of the term system in systems analysis: first, there was the idea that the world is made up of systems, with internal objectives, that need to be analyzed separately from each other in order to maximize their efficiency. Along this first meaning, the analysis would focus on a particular figurative or metaphorical system—such as a weapons system, a social system, or, in the case of early counterinsurgency, a colonial system. Second, there was the notion of systematicity that involved a particular type of method—one that began by collecting a set of promising alternatives, constructing a model, and using a defined criterion. [...] This method of systems analysis became influential in government and eventually began to dominate governmental logics starting in 1961 when Robert McNamara acceded to the Pentagon under President John F. Kennedy. [...] According to its proponents, systems analysis would allow policy makers to put aside partisan politics, personal preferences, and subjective values. It would pave the way to objectivity and truth. As RAND expert and future secretary of defense James R. Schlesinger explained: “[Systems analysis] eliminates the purely subjective approach on the part of devotees of a program and forces them to change their lines of argument. They must talk about reality rather than morality.” 13 With systems analysis, Schlesinger argued, there was no longer any need for politics or value judgments. The right answer would emerge from the machine-model that independently evaluated cost and effectiveness. All that was needed was a narrow and precise objective and good criteria. The model would then spit out the most effective strategy. [...] Counterinsurgency theory blossomed at precisely the moment that systems analysis was, with RAND’s backing, gaining influence in the Pentagon and at the White House. The historian Peter Paret pinpoints this moment, in fact, to the very first year of the Kennedy administration: “In 1961, the Cuban revolution combined with the deteriorating Western position in Southeast Asia [...] It convened, as mentioned earlier, the seminal counterinsurgency symposium in April 1962, where RAND analysts discovered David Galula and commissioned him to write his memoirs. RAND would publish his memoirs as a confidential classified report in 1963 under the title [...] Counterinsurgency theory blossomed at precisely the moment that systems analysis was, with RAND’s backing, gaining influence in the Pentagon and at the White House. The historian Peter Paret pinpoints this moment, in fact, to the very first year of the Kennedy administration: “In 1961, the Cuban revolution combined with the deteriorating Western position in Southeast Asia to shift [...] One recent episode regarding interrogation methods is telling. It involved the evaluation of different tactics to obtain information from informants, ranging from truth serums to sensory overload to torture. These alternatives were apparently compared and evaluated using a SA approach at a workshop convened by RAND, the CIA, and the American Psychological Association (APA). Again, the details are difficult to ascertain fully, but the approach seemed highly systems-analytic. [...] a series of workshops on “The Science of Deception” [...] More specifically, according to this source, the workshops probed and compared different strategies to elicit information. The systems-analytic approach is reflected by the set of questions that the participants addressed: How important are differential power and status between witness and officer? What pharmacological agents are known to affect apparent truth-telling behavior? What are sensory overloads on the maintenance of deceptive behaviors? How might we overload the system or overwhelm the senses and see how it affects deceptive behaviors? These questions were approached from a range of disciplines. The workshops were attended by “research psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists who study various aspects of deception and representatives from the CIA, FBI and Department of Defense with interests in intelligence operations. In addition, representatives from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Science and Technology Directorate of the Department of Homeland Security were present.” 31 [...] And in effect, from a counterinsurgency perspective, these various tactics— truth serums, sensory overloads, torture—are simply promising alternatives that need to be studied, modeled, and compared to determine which ones are superior at achieving the objective of the security system. Nothing is off limits. Everything is fungible. The only question is systematic effectiveness. This is the systems-analytic approach: not piecemeal, but systematic. Incidentally, a few years later, Gerwehr apparently went to Guantánamo, but refused to participate in any interrogation because the CIA was not using video cameras to record the interrogations. Following that, in the fall of 2006 and in 2007, Gerwehr made several calls to human-rights advocacy groups and reporters to discuss what he knew. A few months later, in 2008, Gerwehr died of a motorcycle accident on Sunset Boulevard. 32 He was forty years old. [...] Sometimes, depending on the practitioner, the analysis favored torture or summary execution; at other times, it leaned toward more “decent” tactics. But these variations must now be understood as internal to the system. Under President Bush’s administration, the emphasis was on torture, indefinite detention, and illicit eavesdropping; under President Obama’s, it was on drone strikes and total surveillance; in the first months of the Trump presidency, on special operations, drones, the Muslim ban, and building the wall. What unites these different strategies is counterinsurgency’s coherence as a system—a system in which brutal violence is heart and center. That violence is not aberrational or rogue. It is to be expected. It is internal to the system. Even torture and assassination are merely variations of the counterinsurgency logic. Counterinsurgency abroad and at home has been legalized and systematized. It has become our governing paradigm “in any situation,” and today “simply expresses the basic tenet of the exercise of political power.” It has no sunset provision. It is ruthless, game theoretic, systematic—and legal. And with all of the possible tactics at the government’s disposal—from total surveillance to indefinite detention and solitary confinement, to drones and robot-bombs, even to states of exception and emergency powers—this new mode of governing has never been more dangerous. In sum, The Counterrevolution is our new form of tyranny.