How ISIS Produced Its Cruel Arsenal at Scale | Hacker News Reader

How ISIS Produced Its Cruel Arsenal at Scale

nytimes.com

94 pointsEduardo3rd49 comments

For a more detailed story on how they ran their manufacturing, regarding armored vehicles in particular, there is a fascinating story about The Workshop

> The facility would perform a wide variety of overhauls and upgrades on nearly all types of armoured fighting vehicles in use with the Islamic State, ranging everything from installing multi-spectral camouflage on tanks to the up-armouring of AFVs and even constructing modular turrets for installation on four-wheel drive vehicles such as the Toyota Land Cruiser.

http://spioenkop.blogspot.se/2017/08/armour-in-islamic-state...

That blog has several really interesting articles about DIY armour and fighting vehicles.

Excellent source.

I'm impressed by the variety of tank modifications!

Yeah, I don't see why we need a defense industry. Obviously the boutique market is handling demand just fine.

Some of this is pretty patronising. Amongst the advanced techniques they are surprised Islamic State are able to apply they include 'even affixing written instructions [to weapons]'. It shows you how much people have underestimated them when they are writing articles about how they can write notes and stick them on things.

Doing so consistently for standard weapons indicates a certain level of bureaucratic organization.

Well that's what I mean. People seem absolutely dumfounded that these people are able to form basic bureaucratic organisational structures. They aren't simple people. Many of them have higher education from western countries. They're running their military using the same techniques we do, all the way from similar formal tactics on the ground up to social media PR operations. Them being able to write notes on weapons is the least of our worries.

> People seem absolutely dumfounded that these people are able to form basic bureaucratic organisational structures

Lots of people have big ideas. Few can competently execute on them. This is true of commercial entrepreneurship and international terrorism alike. From what I can tell, ISIS is (or was) unusually well run [1].

[1] http://m.spiegel.de/international/world/islamic-state-files-...

Which is likely the reason why they were unusually successful. There are probably dozens of terrorist organizations run by would-be conquerors which never get very far because their leaders are not competent.

They're running their military using the same techniques we do

Well, of course they are. American Green Berets ran an extensive "train the trainer" programme in Afghanistan, bootstrapping the precursors of the Taliban into a military that could take on the Soviets.

Then once the Soviets were gone, the factions turned on each other, which meant, they continued to practice and refine what they have learned. An ISIS equivalent of a Drill Sergeant probably isn't too different from his Western counterpart...

al-Qaida is also present in Syria in the form of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, previously Nusra Front. They have Afghan veterans in their ranks, but do not have the same level of sofistication and standardization as the Islamic State.

It's not obvious exactly why the IS is different, but I doubt it has anything to do with American influence. Other rebel groups in the Syrian civil war has had direct American training but they were highly undisciplined and ineffective.

If anything they were Iraqi army veterans trained by Soviets. But guess complaining about Russian imperialist overreach is unfashionable.

The big difference is that ISIS descends from Al-Qaida's Iraqi franchise, which picked up a lot of professionalism from demobilized Iraqi Army officers. ISIS was expelled/quit AQ when it started moving in from Iraq and muscling in on Nusra's turf, but they do have common origins.

That's the Taliban in Afghanistan. ISIS grew out of the very different Iraqi context.

The real origin of ISIS's organizational skill is the disbanding of the Iraqi military in 2003 - a totally unnecessary decision on the part of the US that played a big part in the ensuing chaos in the country. Lots of military officers from the old regime, disproportionately Sunni, out of a job, and none too picky about the specific ideologies of the groups that would advance their sectarian interests, transferred their knowledge to groups like AQI, the ancestor of ISIS.

The disbanding of the military was part of the DeBa'athification doctrine. It also banned all members of the Ba'ath party from public employment, including the various affiliated corporations. Private jobs were surprisingly hard to find, given the stigma and the whole war thing.

So not only the military knowledge, but the people that know how to run the factories and the people that can handle the logistics of such a thing. Not to mention teachers, medical staff, and similar posts.

It seems like it was one of the dumbest decisions in history. Had they kept the first admnistrator, Jay Garner, who wanted to have elections in 90 days, you might have had everything Bush stated he wanted - a democratic country in the Middle East. It would probably have fallen into Iranian influence anyway. The decision to go for Paul Bremer who chose to disband the Baath party, all of its members, and delay elections, might eventually be remembered as one of the greatest geopolitical mistakes in history.

They did a ton of other stupid things around the same time. Like changing the flag for example - all that meant that the old flag became a rallying point for the rebels. You would think Americans of all people would realize how potent a symbol a flag is. Then they set up headquarters in Saddam's old palace...

It wasn’t a mistake, but part of the neocon/military industrial complex plan for perpetual war in the Middle East.

This is one of the things that makes me skeptical about trusting smart people. The administration at the time was composed mostly of very intelligent people, and yet they managed to make some of the dumbest decisions in modern history. Being a little too smart often leads to hubris and an unwillingness to consider the possibility that you might be wrong.

> The disbanding of the military was part of the DeBa'athification doctrine.

Which was inspired by the denazification effort in post-WWII Germany. The problem is that the U.S. actually tried to follow through this time (the denazification effort rather notoriously slowed down first as the Allies realised that they needed competent administrators if they didn't want the Germans to starve to death, and then later as the Cold War heated up).

In retrospect the U.S. probably should have deliberately chosen to prosecute only the bigger fish, with a ban from public employment one punishment for the smaller of those. But hindsight is 20/20.

>But hindsight is 20/20.

Then why didn't they clearly see the problems that happened when they tried this is Germany and Japan?

In part, because historians & philosophers have generally castigated the Allies for not being more diligent in their denazification efforts. Morally, of course, they're right: people like Wenher von Braun were very likely guilty of crimes against humanity, and very possibly should have been hanged (he wasn't, of course, and as a result we got to the Moon). In my late-90s education this was all taught as almost unmitigatedly bad thing; the general belief was that we should have done the Right Thing, not the Pragmatic Thing.

Our experience in Iraq indicates that perhaps the Pragmatic Thing can also sometimes be the Right Thing. We might have been able to avoid a lot of injustice with a relatively small amount of injustice.

For this explanation to make sense, you need to consider "mass indiscriminate firing" to be "justice." Those vocal critics of things like Operation Paperclip could have told the Bush administration that was ridiculous in 2003. They were never asked, almost no one was. The occupation strategy was slapped together last minute by people chosen for their political ideology.

In a regime where membership of The Party is mandatory if you want a good job, it's reasonable to assume that many if not most members of The Party were merely ticking a box.

> Many of them have higher education from western countries.

I think one of the reasons that 'these people' aren't frequently over-estimated (or even accurately estimated) is because almost none of them have higher education from their own countries.

Not that many higher education facilities have a specific 'learning from your enemy' track, and it's not as though there are respected rules around not using your enemy's facilities against them ... but you know what I mean.

I think the reason people are 'dumbfounded' is that IS are display a level of rationality and critical thinking that seems entirely at odds with their irrational and uncritical cultural-religious-political beliefs.

The US has a competent military. The country is fundamentally christian - I don't see why the two need to be mutually exclusive.

I didn't read that much into it. I just attributed it to the racist assumption that all non-white non-US persons live like cave people, which makes it that much more impressive that they use any form of technology, whether it be remote controlled explosives or simply the written word.

>even affixing written instructions [to weapons]

Well post 1990 or so you use diagrams on complex weapons because you never know when you'll want to MANPADS (which are fairly complex as weapons systems go) to a bunch of farmers.

I can't imagine how you'd reliably communicate "and then super-elevate right before you fire" to someone either in prose or glyphs on the side of a stinger. You're probably thinking an AT-4, which did, IIRC, have instructions on the side.

Just put an OLED reticule in the side of the device with a training video. So simple a child could use it.

I dunno. Looking at the 'up-armoured' tanks in some articles, it's clear they have no real idea how slat or spaced armour [0] is actually supposed to work, and are just cargo-culting the improvements based on news broadcast images of US or coalition vehicles i.e. they are welding rebar with the same pattern of bars as MRAPs, but directly onto the underlying armour plates, giving no protection against shaped charge HEAT or RPG rounds...!

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slat_armor and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_armor

Western Governments: These terrorists are coming to get you !

General Population: But, but why ?

Western Governements: Because they want to take away your rights and freedoms, of course !

[Proceed to do exactly that ...]

Please watch this. https://youtu.be/rY5Ste5xRAA?t=2543

That's still way too tame.

> "War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/judnazi.asp#common

Remember embedded journalists? Remember "Mission Accomplished"? Remember people being accused of "supporting Saddam"?

I'm not excusing ISIS, they are responsible for what they do. It's "just" that plenty others, still welcome in polite company, are responsible, too. Without that war of aggression built on lies, there would be no ISIS, not at this scale. That is how ISIS came to produce a "cruel arsenal", as opposed to, say, a generous arsenal of peace and nation-building, like drones with which to kill "fun-sized terrorists" ( https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/18/life-as-a-dron... )

It is dark to wonder how many of these failures that perpetuate evil in the world may have been intended? When Eisenhower warned of the creeping power of the military and its network, was that what led to these circumstances today? Like the War on Poverty has shown, bureaucratic inertia is a more powerful force than the good nature of people. Crazy world. We've inherited technology capable of solving the scarcity problem of food, housing and basic needs but still find a way to create more BS and misery in the world.

I hate the modern idea that "doing that which is in your best interest is acceptable. That was very true of the average war-age male during Nazi Germany. The radical ideology, as was mentioned above of ISIS's origins, likewise probably played a secondary supporting role to the economics.

Killing people for profit is not OK: https://theintercept.com/2016/09/09/wolf-blitzer-is-worried-...

> It is dark to wonder how many of these failures that perpetuate evil in the world may have been intended?

One person's intention is another's incentive, so in-between that, I don't think it's dark at all. "Iraq For Sale: The War Profiteers" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYa_3oh1-s4 )

You might say "Cheney's buddies" profited from destroying and murdering, they also profited from "rebuilding", and then the very people who helped create the mess get even more air time to give their expert opinion, as seen in the Daily Show's "Now That's What I Call Being Completely Fking Wrong About Iraq" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqzzWr32srk ).

Hitchens can call comparisons between Haliburton and Islamism "purely frivolous" and outright orders one to "drop it", like in video linked in the sibling comment, but such a bald assertion can quite easily be countered with "no, it's not" and "make me". I prefer to remember the Hitchens that still had spine and priorities (namely the priority of the actions of oneself and one's allies being more important than those of people we don't support or even oppose), as seen for example here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3nAoTev-RE&t=1h20m00s .. the whole thing is interesting, and quite a stark contrast; he used to advocate for putting out fires with water, later he started cheerleading for pouring oil on them. I like the man too much to let him get away with that.

Suddenly one day how did this "ISIS" spring up so well organized with great "PR" work. While they were plying their trade in Syria, they didn't seem to know that their sworn enemies lived just across the border. Wonder why they never really attacked that country.

Because the IDF would have annihilated them. It's far easier to pick on haphazard regimes, who are generally incapable of organizing strategic defensive efforts.

Beyond that, ISIS was more about power and wealth than it was about ideology. The ideology was just a vehicle.

> Because the IDF would have annihilated them. It's far easier to pick on haphazard regimes, who are generally incapable of organizing strategic defensive efforts.

Then why do I read an article like this in Jerusalem Post, quoting WSJ:

http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Report-Israel-treating-al-Q...

They even quote Assad:

“Some in Syria joke: 'How can you say that al-Qaida doesn’t have an air force? They have the Israeli air force',” Assad told Foreign Affairs magazine earlier this year. “They are supporting the rebels in Syria. It is very clear.”

> ISIS was more about power and wealth than it was about ideology. The ideology was just a vehicle.

ISIS/AQ/Whatever-name-their-master-gives-them is a project to destabilize Syrian government that didn't want to play along with plans of the US empire for the Middle East. Quick summary of a FOIA document obtained by Judicial Watch:

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/05/newly-declassified-u-...

BTW, this document was produced in August 2012 by DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency; basically, Pentagon's Intel Agency). At that moment, guess who was its chief: Gen. Michael Flynn. Yes, that Flynn you now see in the media.

EDIT: A video of Flynn:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6Y274U7QIs&feature=youtu.be...

Excellent. It isn't so hard to understand whats going on there. But I guess people often fall for popular narrative. Some do understand, but don't want to admit ;)

My apologies for being ignorant of these sources, and even just for failing to have the imagination to think about that scenario. I will do my homework better next time. Thank you.

Now called WasWas.

According to the prime minister of Iraq's announcement on Twitter a few days ago, "Iraq's armed forces have secured the western desert & the entire Iraq Syria border...this marks the end of the war against Daesh terrorists who have been completely defeated and evicted from Iraq".

Can we have the name Isis back now? Or at least call them Daesh, they hate that name.

They left out the part where the CIA gave them all their weapons.

Source?

He/she is probably referring to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone

Which is and isn't relevant.

Or maybe something like this: https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/831858/Iraq-ISIS-US-Mos...

All sorts of wrong in the linked article - the source is dubious at best.

"“The same way, ISIS was created to counter the Iraqi stance, which did not agree to blockade Syria, was against no-fly zones in Syria and against American military bases.

"The Iraqi society is against foreign military bases on the country's territory coming back to Iraq and setting up bases here."

The Iraqi official also claimed that it was the country’s military that were mainly responsible for driving ISIS out of Mosul."

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