Lately, bounties have been in the news… not the sort captained with exquisite seamanship and monstrous cruelty by the late Capt. Bligh RN, but the sort placed upon one’s head by one’s enemies. These are something very familiar to us in Special Forces, but they don’t always have the effects, practical and psychological, the bounty-placers are seeking.

The practical effect, of course, is to have someone bring the enemy your head in a bag, as a CIA officer rashly promised to do with Osama bin Laden’s head and President Bush’s desk, or at least bring the enemy information that leads to separation of such head, or at a minimum cessation of its alpha waves. The psychological effect desired is for you to fear betrayal and constantly reevaluate the loyalties of your immediate subordinates and staff, to inculcate paranoia and narrow your sphere of contact and influence.

There is some evidence that the latter took place, to some extent, in the realm of Bin Laden and he other Al Qaeda supremos. But the practical effect was nil. Nobody turned him in. Nobody squealed on him. None of his (admittedly attenuated) circle betrayed him. In the end, he was done in by very sophisticated all-source intelligence analysis processing information from, primarily, technical means of collection. (Well, in the end he was done in, we’re told, by two 77-grain Black Hills boat tails, but it took a lot of spookery to put the shooter in his bedroom).

Pay packet for the ultimate "don't be that guy" guy.

Bounties don’t usually work. There are several reasons why.

1. The target and his circle are not motivated by money. They may actively disdain it.
2. They may value money, but the life of the target is something they value far more. How much money would it take for you to violate a fundamental precept of your religion? To give up your children? That’s the point. (Think of the place held by thirty pieces of silver in Christian scripture and belief).
3. The auxiliary and underground supporting the target fear him and his retribution.
4. Those people who could betray him, do not trust the entity offering the bounty.
5. The people who would betray him are kept outside the circle of knowledge of his location by elementary compartmentation, a feature of all successful undergrounds.
6. The target and his organization have successfully inculcated in-group morality and an anti-snitching ethos in their culture. The Mafia code of omerta is a familiar example of this. The Taliban, as a Pashtun movement, have the essential building-blocks of in-group morality in the code of pushtunwali, their difficulty is to extend the code to embrace their Arab, Chechen etc. volunteers while deprecating its protection of the wounded, guests, travellers and captives.
7. The bounty becomes instead a butt of humor. More on this anon.

But the bottom line is that bounties usually fail as a means of bringing targets to justice, whether justice means two years of mocking the legal system in our dysfunctional courts or taking a couple of rounds in the brain housing group.

Bounties come into the news periodically, recently because the US has placed them on more Islamic terrorists affiliated with al-Qaeda, as-Shabab, or various other gangs of bad actors. In the past, few of these bounties have been collected (even though many of the targeted guys have gone, shall we say, nonoperational), and there’s no reason to expect much better here.

But the clever men of As-Shabab have turned the whole meme back on the US, by offering a bounty on the heads of President Obama and Secretary Clinton. For Obama: ten camels. For Hillary: ten hens and ten cocks. The story’s been widely reported, for example here:

“Anyone who helps the Mujahideen find the whereabouts of Obama and Hillary Clinton will be rewarded with 10 Camels to the information leading to Obama and 10 hens and 10 cocks for Hillary,” said senior Shabaab commander Fuad Mohamed Khalaf in a statement reported on numerous websites.

Earlier this week… the U.S.offered $7 million for founder and commander Ahmed Abdi Aw-Mohamed, AKA Godane orMukhtar Abu Zubeir, five million for Khalaf and three other men, and $3 million apiece for two other leaders….

In his response to the U.S. rewards, Khalaf said that “infidels” offering bounties for Muslims was “nothing new.”

“There is nothing new in the fact that infidels pay to have Muslim leaders killed,” said Khalaf. “They already did that by offering camels for the head of Prophet Mohammed, and the dollar is the camel of today.”

Khalaf was referencing a passage in the Koran in which 100 camels were offered for the Prophet Mohammed as he fled Mecca for Medina.

“I can assure you that these kind of things will never dissuade us from continuing the holy war against them,” said Khalaf.

This is, of course, a joke, and all across Somalia and the greater Islamic ummah, these two American constitutional officers are a laughingstock today, and the bounty program is an object of mirth and mockery. Some of that tone comes up in the report above, filed by a Somali journalist. Expect these facts to be reported in the British but not American press, but expect them to get a lot of ink in the Islamic world. Even our allies against the extremists take a certain glee in seeing American hubris mocked.

This is what happens when you have always been told, as the President and many other Americans in decision-making positions have been told, that you are a Unique and Special Snowflake and that your excellence is blinding in its brilliance and your intellect is without peer –all in aid of polishing your self-esteem, from the earliest age. You naturally internalize this belief, and conversely assume that comically-bearded men in cotton mandresses and plastic shoes are stupid and beneath your consideration. You (to use another president’s remarkable accidental neologism) misunderestimate them. Then they make an ass out of you. This is the capsule story of American information operations in the Islamic world.

This must be especially puzzling for those denizens of Washington whose senses of humour, particularly about themselves, are less robust tan they might be. We leave naming these persons as an exercise for the reader.

(Aside: why is Secretary Panetta absent from the bounty list? Two possibilities: 1, they have limited supplies of livestock and have to prioritize; 2, they think he’s more advantageous for them than any possible replacement).

As we mentioned, SF has long experience with bounties. During the Vietnam war, our guys used bounties as a means to keep our indigenous troops, many of whom had a blood score to settle with any and all lowland ethnic Vietnamese, from whacking prisoners. Prisoners were highly valuable for the information in their heads, but long-victimized Montagnards or Cambodians might know that in their heads, but lose control when an actual, living, breathing example of the race that abused them was at their mercy. The bounty was an incentive given in-house to produce a desired effect. Occasionally it even worked, especially if American round eyes were kept upon the prisoner in case intervention was needed. (On the plus side, having a bunch of frustrated Bodes stropping knives nearby usually made for a voluble and honest interrogation subject).

The other way round, the NVA placed bounties on SF men, particularly on reconnaissance teams. The bounty was a standard part of Unit 559’s counter-reconnaissance plans (Unit 559 ran, and provided security for, the road and trail network collectively called “the Ho Chi Minh trail”). Most of these bounties went uncollected, but we have our doubts about a couple of disturbing incidents where the team’s indigenous personnel returned from a mission to report that all two or three Americans on the team were lost (a typical team was six men with two Americans, but sometimes a third was along. The other four or so men were indigenous, all usually from the same ethnic or religious minority in Vietnam).  In most of that relative handful of cases, the missing Americans remain missing, although they’ve almost certainly been dead since their mission, and the Carter Administration had them presumptively declared dead in 1977 to cut off money for benefits to their families.

The bounty continued as a tool of various Communist and Communist-inspired terrorist and revolutionary movements. There was a bounty on USSF in El Salvador. In Bolivia in the 1990s on a training mission, we were informed by our host-nation counterpart, we’ll call him Captain Z, that the ELN (National Liberation Army) terrorist group had placed a bounty of $50,000 on our heads, but not to worry about it. Why not? “Everyone knows they don’t really have that kind of money,” he said. “If I thought they did, I’d turn you in myself!” Thanks, guy. (See reason it doesn’t work #4 above).

Later, in Afghanistan not long after SF and Afghan tribal forces had liberated the country, the Taliban was offering $6,000 to take an indirect fire (rocket or mortar) shot at the Americans. They had few takers, partly because the hills were alive with the promise of liberation, freedom, and a better future, and partly because they feared American retribution more than they wanted $6k (that’s really saying something, as the average single guy there was trying to raise a bride-price of as much as $10,000 so he could get married, and on the rare occasion that there was any work the going wage was $1.50 a day — $2 for very hazardous work, like coal mining).

The then conventional Army came, and now plenty of Afghans shoot at us for free. Progress!

So, the idea of offering a bounty is nothing new, but it is seldom crowned with success. (In this way it’s like the gun buybacks that are offered by urban PDs. Gangbangers use them to dispose of hot murder weapons, making evidence permanently disappear, but mostly they collect  old and broken guns, or cheap guns that retail for less than the buyback amount, which are smuggled specifically to make a profit on the buyback).

And the as-Shabab bounties can only be called a failure, because the terrorists’ superior information operations cycle and imagination turned it into a spectactular joke.

Note: the “30 pieces of silver” image came from here, a Christian website that illustrates various scriptural motifs.