Post apocalyptic mafias

The most popular post apocalyptic despotic rulers of a collapsed American apocalypse-in-progress novels are the gang-bangers.  Before them it was often the motor cycle gangs that ruled the collapsed world.  The shift starting sometime in the 1980s, with Newton Thornburg's Valhalla (1980) being the earliest example I know of where the motorcyclists don't make an appearance, but the gang bangers (called Mau Mau) are there.

Since we are all about the historical precedence that lies behind possible apocalyptics, it might be nice to know how at least some of today crime syndicates came to be.

In this case we have a very nice study of the rise of the Mafia. 

On the historical and geographic origins of the Sicilian mafia (pdf)  (or here)

Paolo Buonanno, Ruben Durante, Giovanni Prarolo, and Paolo Vanin, 1 May 2011 (hat tip: FTA via MR)

This research attempts to explain the large differences in the early diffusion of the mafia across different areas of Sicily. We advance the hypothesis that, after the demise of Sicilian feudalism, the lack of publicly provided property-right protection from widespread banditry favored the development of a florid market for private protection and the emergence of a cartel of protection providers: the mafia. This would especially be the case in those areas (prevalently concentrated in the Western part of the island) characterized by the production and commercialization of sulphur and citrus fruits, Sicily’s most valuable export goods whose international demand was soaring at the time.

I think to some degree they understand that they are discussing necessary conditions, not deterministic causality.   They note that there are other factors involved:

The evidence presented here suggests that, under given economic circumstances, geographic characteristics may have contributed to the emergence of particular forms of social organizations (criminal ones in this case) which have persisted overtime and continue to have non-negligible socio-economic effects.

In this case the nature of sulphur production was an important factor:  The need to get the mule trains safely to market through very rugged terrain.

Eventually the conclude that the following factors were paramount:

1. The increasing value of citrus fruits and sulphur were the funding agents
2. The lack of protective organizations within the productive or transport areas
3. The roughness of the terrain
4. Population density - the Mafia grew first where there were more people.

Not all of these are obvious.  IMO the population correlation is because there are only a fraction of people within a society who are interested in doing this type of work, the more people you have available the larger the pool to select from.   On the flip side a larger population generally also has more criminal opportunities available.

One item, I think is closely related to what I have said in the past about Pirates.  You need commerce, and you need trade, to have sophisticated criminal organizations.   There is no point in robbing and pillaging if there is nothing you can do exchange the excess loot that you will develop in certain categories.

Societies with little commerce tend to have cattle raiders and wife stealers, not organized hierarchical criminal groups.

The Black Hand (apparently available as a note card?)

Casualties

So we are reading our fictional accounts of apocalypsse-in-progress battle, and the good guys are just mowing down the bad guys.  If it is one of the traditional penultimate battle scenes being fought at the defended berm, wall, etcetera thousands of attackers are wiped out by a handful of defenders.

Well obviously if you set up an artificial situation the results are going to get a little odd.

But what exactly does happen when an attack goes in.  Particularly what happens when you take out all the artillery, tanks, mortars, and other heavy weapons.

Expected attacker casualties

from Stress of Battle, David Rowland (The Stationary Office, 2007) via Salt (see below for link).


* 1 to 1 attacker/defender ratio; losses per defender: .25; losses per machine gun: 2.25
* 3 to 1 attacker/defender ratio; losses per defender: .5; losses per machine gun: 4.5
* 10 to 1 attacker ratio; losses per defender: 1.0; losses per machine gun: 9.0

Note that although the chance of success increases with the number of troops attacking, the number of people killed goes up as the number of targets become plentiful.  I am taking the machine guns to be light machines used as point defence weapons.  Not the heavy machine guns we discussed earlier.

The amount of ammunition fired to accomplish any casualties will be fairly large. 

Five Minutes of rooty-toot
John D. Salt, The Nugget, February 2008

If we were to assume that defending sections fired off 75 rounds per personal weapon and 750 rounds per machine gun (both figures in the mid-range of ammo loads...), the hitting rate would be something of the order of 300 rounds per hit at a 1:1 attack ratio, 150 rounds per hit at a 3:1 attack ratio, and 75 per hit at 10:1 attack ratio.  Given that most infantry fire is conducted below 300 meter, this standard of shooting is about two orders of magnitude worse than one might expect on the range.  Recall, too, that this is for defenders shooting at attackers, who are obliged to make targets of themselves in order to close [with] the enemy.

Shooting at prone or dug-in defenders would presumably be less effective still; in his book Passing it on (Bhavana, 200) about North West Frontier fighting, Sir Andrew Skeen says that "it is next to impossible to inflict loss on men behind cover with direct rifle fire", I would go so far as to say that not only is suppression the main effect of bullet fire, but it is, to a close approximation, the only effect.  It helps to explain why rates of expenditure are low in protracted close combat if people are not firing  because they are, most of the time, suppressed.  Reliable quantitative data on the suppressive effect of fire are, unfortunately, rarer than hen's teeth.

 So, what this means is that if we have 300 men advancing, in a modern (dispersed) fashion, 300 meters against 100 men firing from foxholes, or some sort of cover, the attacker will take 50 casualties and the defenders will have fired around 22,500 rounds (or about 608 pounds of ammo at 37 pounds per round for .223/5.56x45 NATO).   The defenders might loss one of their number.

On their way to having 1 in 6 of their numbers casualties will likely peak at around 100 meters.  At that point the defending troops start getting a little nervous and their aim/resolve begins to deteriorate.  It is in this zone, the last 100 meters that the attack will either succeed or fail.  It is not an accident that Poole called his popular (but at times rare) explanatory manual for NCO (Non-commissioned officers) The Last 100 Yards.  If the attackers loose their nerve, they will go to ground, and an extended ineffectual fire fight is likely to ensue.

So what makes the difference.

Speight and Roland, using historical norms for British troops, modeled soldiers level of war fighting resolve in the attack in a tiered fashion:


L.R. Speight and D. Roland in Modelling the Rural Infantry Battle: The Effects of Live Combat  on Military Skills and Behavior During the Approach Phase, Military Operations Research, V13, N4 2008.

Type A, roughly 7%of the force, avoid combat and are described as non-participating (NPA)

Type B, again 7% of the force, freeze at contact (FAC)

Type C, 36% , continue after contact, but subsequently halt and do not fire, the freeze during advance (FDA)

Type D, 37%, maintain their advance to the end, but make no effective use of their weapons, they are passive followers (PAF)

Type E, 11% are full participants in combat, but weapon use is sub-optimal, they are active followers (ACF)

Type F, 2% are the heroic performers - fully participating and making full effective use of their weapons, they are the heroes (HRO).

Note in a well run army, that has seen a little combat, the heroes will tend to be the experienced NCOs and officers.  They will lead their men into battle.  Some of their men will follow. As an aside, it can be seen why armies that do not have effective low-level leadership are so completely outfought by armies that make a religion of it.  If the troops come from a hierarchical background (they need to orders to act) they will sit on their hands if their is no heroes in command positions.  It also explains the odd battle field results of American troops in both World Wars where singular individuals would often run around and shoot up an enormous number of (usually) Germans.  The Americans, excepting the Marine Corp which saw a lot of action in Latin America, had not had enough time to sort out its small unit leadership situation.  They were often pretty raw.  Almost religiously non-hierarchical Americans not feeling compelled to wait for orders, and maybe not always listening to them anyway , none-the-less derived a lot of their effectiveness from these singular (crazed?) heroes.  American "heroes" didn't wait for orders.

Without going into to many details, Speight and Roland note that while the ability to actually hit a target goes way down, that the target area to suppress the target (get him to hit the deck) is much larger.  They need to hear the bullets.   The net effect is that small arms do not cause many casualties, they do make people hit the deck. 

Better quality (elite) troops will inflict more casualties on the attackers.  Mostly because they will have more defenders willing to stick their heads up and shoot at any exposed attackers.  The suppressive effect of this additional firepower negates the risk of sticking your head up.  The elite troops will not suffer greater casualties.  Raw conscripts tend not to stick their head up when being under effective suppressive fire.  This tends to magnify their disadvantage against elite troops who are putting out more firepower.  In the case of the study, elite troops such as the Ghurkas were 160% effective versus the normative benchmark at both inflicting causalities and the number of heroes (based on gallantry medals).  As an aside, machine gun crews, tend to be less susceptible to suppression.  My guess is it is because they view their significant firepower as being directly effective in their units survival.  Working as a team, the crew also appears (based on this study) to follow the lead of the bravest person present.

One final important note that the authors make, is that a lot of small cumulative advantages will add up to very non-linear results.  The various 10 to 60% advantages of the elite units, and their (usually) elite leadership, can add up to a force effectiveness 10 to 20 times their opponents.  This does not make them supermen.  The catastrophic levels of damage that modern weapons can inflict insures that elite troops will over time be worn down.  Elite troops used too frequently over too long of a period of time, tend to lose their edge.

The other interesting item, not specifically stated but implied, is that it is very likely that the majority of the kills-major injuries are inflicted by the "heroes" and machine gunners.  Since heroes performance is not degraded by fear, they actually make the easy shots.  If they see the target at 100 meters, they are likely to hit it.   The numbers indicate that, outside of the machine guns, 90% of your kills/injuries from small arms are inflicted by 5% or less of the troops.  This would make infantry combat rather  similar to aces in aerial warfare. Before I had started looking at the numbers, that would have surprised me.

Power is relational; domination is institutional

Manuel Costells has a new (large) tome out on power and communication.  As his earlier work,  The Information Age Trilogy,  are considered classics.  I came across an interesting summation of this new (600+ page work).

Book Review – Communication Power – 1

Kiva Loaner, The Global Sociology Blog 7 April 2012 (hat tip: NC)

[F]or Castells, coercion is only one mechanism in a multilayered conception of power. And the more human minds can be shaped on behalf of specific interests and values, the less coercion and violence will be needed.  The construction of meaning to shape minds and to have these meanings embedded in institutions is important as they produce legitimation...

If there is no such construction of meaning, then, the state’s intervention in the public sphere will be exposed as an exercise in the defense of specific interests and naked power, triggering a legitimation crisis... That is, the state will be seen as an instrument of domination rather than an institution of representation. There is no legitimation without consent based on shared meaning....

...Social structures are, as Castells puts it, crystallize power relationships reflecting the state of never-ending conflict between opposing social actors and whose capacity to institutionalize their values and interests prevailed. And these social structures are themselves the products of processes of structuration that are multilayered and multiscalar (global, regional, national, local…

"Power is not located in one particular social sphere or institution, but it is distributed throughout the entire realm of human action. Yet, there are concentrated expressions of power relationships in certain social forms that condition and frame the practice of power in society at large by enforcing domination. Power is relational, domination is institutional."

Because of my historical interests, I tend to view the State's dominance in mass communications as being one of those trends that is best exemplified by the fascist states of Italy and Germany in the 20th century.  Although governments of course had used various means of persuasion, often religious in nature, to get the common folk on their side, none of this had had the immediacy of the new medium of radio, film, and latter television.

The power of these new ideas allowed controlling societies to be less hierarchical in a literal sense because the soft means of control (through ideas) was that much stronger.  Think of the modern work place.  They typically don't have 12 layers of management anymore: they just read your email and log into your facebook account.

Bubble bursting Brazilian style

There is a lot of discussion of Latin America being the economy of the future, and Peurtogueze speaking Brazil becoming the new giant in the Western Hempishere.

But as the following piece notes, "Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be."

Swimming naked in Brazil's bubbly waters

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Telegraph (U.K.), 15 April 2012 (hat tip: NC)

"Prices are crazy," said Eduardo Paes, Rio’s mayor. Even 'favelas' are frothy as developers close in. A good slum is worth a four-bedroom house in Arizona - if you can prove ownership.

"Brazil is experiencing a typical housing bubble," said Samy Davy from the Getulio Vargas Foundation. "It risks widespread damage to the Brazilian financial system and economy as occurred in the US."

"We estimate that the market is overvalued by as much as 50%," said Neil Shearing from Capital Economics. With luck, the bubble will "deflate slowly" as the economy motors at 3pc to 4pc and inflation erodes real debt.

The fear is that a Chinese hard-landing/credit contraction will intrude...

Labour productivity has not remotely kept pace with China or the Asian tigers, which is why industrial output has almost halved to 14.6pc of GDP, a level last seen before the great industrialization drive of the of late 1950s. The country is becoming 'post-industrial' before it is rich.

The Brazilian response is protectionism.

President Dilma Rousseff - an urban guerrilla during the military dictatorship of the early 1970s - has blamed the real’s strength on a "monetary tsunami" of funds fleeing Anglo-Saxon QE in search of yield.

Her response is to throw up a screen of 40 protectionist barriers, with import surcharges and a Buy Brazil edict for procurement even where local products are 25pc more expensive. "We have to take measures to defend ourselves. We cannot let our manufacturing sector be cannibalized."

Ex-central bank chief Gustavo Franco said the policies are retrograde, damning the government’s "currency war" mantra as escapism. "They don’t seem to understand the real issues."

 

Note that the new sources, which get much of their adverstising revenues from financial sources are predisposed to dislike protectionist measures.  And many will point out that the United States during its growth period in the 19th century was highly protectionist, and even that Britain during its growth phase was more of a mercantile state than the supposedly tightly controlled French economy.

Unfortunately, on the domestic front there are differences in how the countries are run.  The United States, for all its enormous economic power, usually had a miniscule regular army, and an almost as miniscule navy.  Federal budgets were generally small.  Our economic system of the 19th century could look a little like a banana republic at times, but it was a bannana republic run cheap.

Brazil: not so much (source as above):

It is true that hot money has flooded the country, but this is because the central bank has kept rates at nose-bleed levels to offset the inflationary effects of government spending....

Brazil has wasted much of its commodity bonanza subsidizing a bloated state, with "Greek" retirement at 54 and ruinous pension costs. A Santander study said Brazil has still "Cambodian-style" infrastructure.

Brazil, Australia, and Canada are three countries that come to my mind when I think of current commodity booms.  But at least in theory that would be the time to pay off debt.  To squeeze the market so that it does not overextend itself on the flood of money coming in.  If you act in a protectionist fashion when you are growing, you can also to some degree protect your local economy from the Dutch Desease.  Spending like there is no tomorrow is not the way to go:  not that we citizens of the United States are in much of position to criticize.

-Note:  I am sorry about the paragraph gaps.  Blogger was being strange and I couldn't find any easy fixes.