WIREDConventional military power stands little chance against a band of swarming 14th-century terrorists, according to John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, the RAND analysts who wrote the book on "netwar." Here's their five-point plan to tear apart the terror network

Arquilla, John

Ronfeldt, David

Calhoun, Institutional Archive of the Naval Postgraduate School

Calhoun: The NPS Institutional ArchiveFaculty and Researcher Publications Faculty and Researcher Publications2001Fighting The Network WarArquilla, Johnhttp://hdl.handle.net/10945/416395/12/14, 2:59 PMWired 9.12: Fighting The Network WarPage 1 of 4http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/netwar_pr.html THE NEW RULES OF ENGAGEMENTFighting The Network WarConventional military power stands little chance against a band of swarming 14th-centuryterrorists, according to John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, the RAND analysts who wrote thebook on "netwar." Here's their five-point plan to tear apart the terror network.Know your enemy. It's the oldest military axiom in the world. As the United States takes action against theperpetrators of the September 11 attacks, this advice has never been more apt. The first step in defeatingthe type of terror invoked by Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda is figuring out how the organization operates.Think of al Qaeda as a coalition of dispersed network nodes - linked, as PCs are, to one another and todatabases of information. The network uses the Internet for real-time dissemination of instructions towage its particular brand of asymmetrical warfare - favoring an attack on a soft civilian target like anairliner over a direct assault on US forces in the field. Battling such a foe is tantamount to taking on ahybrid peer-to-peer network, in which a central source triggers the actions that are carried out byindividual nodes. The good news is that the US already knows a few things about such networks;structurally, al Qaeda is similar to Colombian and Mexican drug cartels, which also feature small, nimble,and dispersed units capable of penetrating, disrupting, eluding, and evading.The bad news: The US military is woefully unprepared to fight a war against such an enemy. Transnationalterrorists have shown it's possible to swarm together swiftly, on cue, then pulse to the attacksimultaneously. Simply dropping bombs on Afghanistan will do little against this kind of a decentralizedfoe.To win, this network must be isolated and ripped apart, node by node. The best hope is to redesign USintelligence systems to anticipate how this new enemy thinks. The US must build its own network - aquicker, more diverse, populous, and powerful organization that includes military and nonmilitaryorganizations around the world - in order to wage a full-on netwar.The term netwar may evoke visions of 25th-century technologies deployed from the far reaches of space.But netwar is not techwar; it's far less sexy and more sweaty.Al Qaeda's power comes in its organization. Beyond access to the Net, the network has little in the way oftechnology - almost no military tech, and its members don't even use cell phones for fear of being tracked.As a result, defeating al Qaeda has less to do with technology and more to do with military doctrine. Towin a netwar, the US has to rethink some of its fundamental national security principles.Be Smart About Intelligence 5/12/14, 2:59 PMWired 9.12: Fighting The Network WarPage 2 of 4http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/netwar_pr.htmlThe recrafting of military systems to succeed in a protracted war on terrorism starts with intelligence. TheUS system of central intelligence needs to evolve into a decentralized, transnational network thatcommunicates in real time. Just as the swift movement of information has redefined business - strippingguesswork out of the supply chain, for example - it can alter the outcome in a netwar. All-channel dataflow reduces the need for an explicit chain of command.It's not that the military has failed to emulate business practices; it's just been disinclined to try. Unlikebusinesses, intelligence agencies measure bureaucratic power by the information they control. Such anapproach can be fatally flawed.This proved true in August, when a man suspected of being a member of the Armed Islamic Group (GIA)was apprehended by US authorities on illegal immigration charges in Minnesota. He came to the FBI'sattention when a wary flight instructor let them know the man wanted to use a 747 flight simulator tolearn how to turn - not takeoff or land - a plane. During the September attacks, he was in his jail cell. Witha bit of networking, the French, who closely follow terrorist movements in their former colony, might haveinformed US officials that he was an extremely dangerous GIA member - warranting vigorousinterrogation. The lesson: Sharing knowledge with partners enhances its value. This must become thenorm.Another way to boost the quality and quantity of intelligence is to cultivate more of an open source model- by including nongovernmental organizations, like Amnesty International, in the network. This will make itpossible to draw on the knowledge of activist groups already engaged in waging social netwars around theworld. Much of the intelligence we need is openly available - it's just a matter of looking in the rightplaces.Adding NGOs to a sensory network will also help develop loyalty to a cause. The al Qaeda network drawsits strength from the tight religious and kinship bonds among its members. To be effective, the US'scounternetwork will need to have its own binding, democracy-driven value system.Manage the Memes To win a netwar, the US must control the battle of the story. For starters, that means the US and its alliesmust agree on what story they're selling. Should America's response to the terrorism be phrased in termsof a war? Or should it be addressed through a law enforcement paradigm - with increased security in thestreets? In the days after the attacks, American allies may well have preferred the latter. But a surge in USnationalist sentiment made clear which way the American people wanted to go. President Bush called theterrorist attacks an "act of war" - against not only America but "the civilized world."It was an effective rallying cry and a strong show of leadership - and Bush quickly won the support ofqueasy allies. But there's danger in allowing the netwar to devolve into a battle of civilizations or faiths.The attacks have intensified a broad-based clash of rhetoric between Western liberal ideas about thespread of free markets, free peoples, and open societies, and Muslim convictions about the exploitative,invasive, demeaning nature of Western incursions into the Islamic world. But the war against terror mustnot be seen as one of Western values against Islam.Instead, the story should focus on what Jeremy Rifkin refers to as a time war - in this case between anemerging global civilization of the 21st century and a xenophobic religious fanaticism of the 14th century(or earlier). Osama bin Laden and his cohorts are tribal, medieval, absolutist, and messianic. The best wayto expose them as such is to create a self-propagating meme - a winning idea or, in business parlance, abit of viral marketing - that reveals them for what they truly are.Here, the US and its allies could use some help. Ideally, such a meme would be spread by respectedIslamic imams who would repudiate the notion that the Koran sanctions terrorism. This is hardly far-5/12/14, 2:59 PMWired 9.12: Fighting The Network WarPage 3 of 4http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/netwar_pr.htmlfetched, as even Taliban imams have ruled that bin Laden has no authority to issue fatwas. The quickerthis meme replicates - by way of the Net and other media - the more likely members of the al Qaedanetwork will be rejected by the majority of the Muslim world for which they purport to be fighting.Learn to Swarm The al Qaeda network recognizes the effectiveness of swarming. It exploits the nonlinear nature of thebattle space and sees the value of attacking from multiple directions with dispersed units. The moregeographically diverse the targets, the more unpredictable and effective the terrorist network. Witness alQaeda attacks on targets in Arabia, Africa, and the US during the past five years. In September, widelydispersed operatives converged on four separate targets simultaneously. They likely had the capability tostrike at even more sites, and almost certainly are holding some units in reserve.US military doctrine, on the other hand, is based on mass-and-maneuver concepts. The Pentagon mustestablish a new plan based on small-unit swarming. The US should learn to strike the enemy from manydirections, in different places, all at once. This will keep terrorists on the run.To make it work, the counternetwork needs special-force maneuvers, not industrial age methods suited forfighting in Europe's Fulda Gap or in the Persian Gulf. Updated battlefield intelligence practices andinternetted battlefield sensors could aid in the coordination of the attacks - allowing commandos to relayinformation in real time without scrubbing it through the National Ground Intelligence Center or other spyshops. This isn't about war at standoff range. It's about using information to get small strike teams in theenemy's face.Rethink Technology In every war the US has waged, advanced technology has generally served as a big advantage. In WorldWar II, the first computers - used in a project code-named Magic - cracked Japanese encryptedcommunications and helped win the battle for the Pacific. More recently, in Kosovo, electronic warfaredevices spoofed Serb radar, allowing the US to wage an 11-week air campaign while losing only one plane.In a netwar, military technology is not such an obvious advantage. The US possesses an array ofsophisticated systems, like the Global Command and Control System and the Joint Surveillance and TargetAttack Radar System. Al Qaeda, on the other hand, has relatively few. But against dispersed, networkedterrorists, the Pentagon's high tech spy equipment is of limited value. Satellites may be able to look downon specific buildings - or tents - but they can't reveal who's in them. Same with smart bombs, which canbe guided to a target - with no guarantee that anyone will be inside. This was exactly the case with thefailed US missile strike against bin Laden at an al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan three years ago.Instead of spending roughly $30 billion a year on such technology, the US military should create a range oflower-cost, Web-based intelligence tools to take on the 60-country terror network. Al Qaeda operativescommunicate over the Internet by using low tech word-substitution codes rather than sophisticatedencryption. They should be tracked, perhaps with more powerful versions of a marketer's cookies. Suchdevices could even be planted as "taggants" at sites frequented by terrorists, or as lures to attract them to"honey pots." This would also lessen reliance on the FBI Carnivore snoop system and other initiatives thatundermine civil liberties.Attack the Core Overcoming a widely dispersed, multihub network with no center seems nearly impossible. But al Qaedahas a center. The removal of bin Laden means that the network could crumble. And therein lies hope forthe West.5/12/14, 2:59 PMWired 9.12: Fighting The Network WarPage 4 of 4http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/netwar_pr.htmlIn some ways, al Qaeda is to terrorism as Napster is to file-sharing. True, declawing Napster did little toput an end to the swapping of MP3 files; smaller, even more decentralized P2P networks have popped up inits place. Taking out bin Laden could splinter al Qaeda into similar networks - the Gnutellas of terror. Butwhile Gnutella can effectively operate as a file-sharing mechanism, it wouldn't be nearly as effective as aterror network. Without bin Laden at its core, al Qaeda could turn out to be a network without amobilization mechanism.In the end, terrorism is much bigger than Osama bin Laden. A true win in this netwar means confronting ascourge that's bigger than even al Qaeda. It means battling anyone in the world who shares theseterrorists' mind-set and modus operandi. It means, eventually, taking on every node in the entire terroristnetwork.RAND analysts John Arquilla (arquilla@rand.org) and David Ronfeldt (ronfeldt@rand.org) cowroteNetworks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy (RAND, 2001).Warning: Uninitialized variable or array index or property (slist) in functions.phtml on line 910Warning: Variable passed to each() is not an array or object in functions.phtml on line 855Copyright © 1993-2004 The Condé Nast Publications Inc. All rights reserved.Copyright © 1994-2003 Wired Digital, Inc. All rights reserved.

Fighting The Network War

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