Thursday 11 September 2003

Two Years On

This is what I said two years ago.

A New Kind of Warfare



There's no easy and quick answer to this one.

Like many people who have contributed to discussions over the past decade in places like the Compuserve Military Forum, http://www.stratfor.com, http://www.strategypage.com and others, I've done some analysis on Threats, so know a bit about what I speak.

The general consensus had been that Cyberwarfare was going to be the Next Big Thing. Global Thermonuclear War was passe, terrorism had been shown to be at best ineffectual, at worst counter-productive. Instead, the threat was going to be vs infrastructure, the weapons anything from a judiciously placed lump of Semtex, to frame-ups of key personnel or their relatives, to The Worm From Hell. Few lives if any would be lost, the hip-pocket nerve would be the target. I thought this myself, based on the evidence that no terrorist group had ever detonated a nuke or caused millions or even thousands of casualties in one attack.

But the so-called Nuclear threshold has now been crossed. OK, so they didn't use Nukes as such - but the effect in terms of damage to property and people was comparable with a small nuke. What makes a Nuke so terrible? It's the random, massive destruction, the defencelessness we as a civilised society have against it. The actual kill mechanism is less important, except symbolically.

The point is, with Civilisation - the concept of having cities with such
things as sewerage, electricity, internet access, public health - addiction to that concept leaves you vulnerable. Water supplies can be contaminated, subways can be filled with poison gas, airliners can be hijacked and sent crashing into skyscrapers, and there is no defence against this. None.

You can make things harder - for example, I doubt that the next hijackers will be believed if they say "don't resist any no-one will get hurt." But for every gap you fill, there are hundreds of others left wide open. A Police State that covers most of these gaps leaves the facade of Society intact, while destroying the heart, and still doesn't cover everything.

For my own peace of mind I won't say a half-dozen other things that have been openly discussed as being more destructive, and a lot easier to pull off than Ground Zero. I'm 99% sure that any Bad Hats reading this will already have thought of them, but if one happened, the thought that they might have been in the remaining 1% and got the idea here would destroy me.

I fully expect that some of them will be used, or attempted, against us no matter what we do or do not do.

All you can do in the way of defence is make things so that random crazies are very likely to get caught, and do not cause too much immediate damage or long-term trauma if they get through. Against a wealthy, well-organised and widespread group with literally millions of dollars to spend on airfares, equipment, forged documents and so on, there is no credible defence. None.

If they are a bunch of amateurs, their sheer size and communications will make them detectable long before they're able to do anything. But if they're smart, recent events have shown that they can evade the system we had in place before September 11th., and likely will be able to do so for some years to come.

Until September 11th though, deterrence had worked. The chances of being able to get through the defences were so small, and the consequences of a successful strike being so large, that the game wasn't worth the candle.

But now every Xenophobic group who until now has had to watch impotently as liberal states had run roughshod over their favourite hatreds and prejudices will have gained heart, and probably more financial support.

OK, so there's no defence. What are our options?

Option a) Give In.

One trouble with this one is that we don't know who to surrender to.

Should we say "Ok, we'll stop going after the Popular Front for the Liberation of Judea", then the Judean People's Liberation Organisation, their hated enemy, will attack us even harder until we reverse our course.

Then there's the old saw "He who pays Danegeld is never free of the Danes". Blackmailers historically require more and more. Should we give the Bad Hats a reward for their behaviour, they'll naturally repeat it.

At the risk of showing some naivity, there's also a matter to be considered: we wouldn't have been taking the actions the Bad Hats don't want us to if we hadn't thought them to be either right at the time, or at least in our best interests. For example, I'm so much in favour of allowing freedom of political thought that I wouldn't give it up to save my life.

Finally, there's another issue: some of the Bad Hats don't take prisoners, they won't accept our surrender. The type of people whose beliefs allow them to deliberately massacre civilians as a prime objective - rather than do so accidentally, or as regrettable byproduct of military neccessity - are the type who won't listen to us if we cry "Uncle!". The mere existence of liberal states is anathema to them. It's Their Way or No Way, Right is on their side, and no abomination is unjustifiable if the End is good.

So for a variety of completely practical and cynical reasons, giving up or even bending a bit is right out. At least this saves us some painful soul-searching.

b) Attack the Enemy's Capabilities.

If the Enemy isn't physically able to harm you, you don't care what they think.

The basic problem we have here is that the Enemy presents few clear-cut targets.

Either they're effectively stealthed, or they're inextricably mixed up with a lot of innocents, third parties, or ourselves. For example, we could adopt a policy of shooting down all airliners even remotely suspected of being hijacked.

This would certainly take out all hijackers, but also countless of our own families.

Still, there are a number of targets, that can be serviced by a number of means.

The targets vary from such obvious ones as military training camps, which can be neutralised by special forces, conventional invasion, air attacks, nukes or political pressure to close them, through to financial supporters, who can be rendered bankrupt via cyberwarfare, have their assets frozen, or just simply assassinated, by bullet, bomb, frame-up or airstrike. Disinformation causing their own side to kill them is a particularly neat way of doing things, as it provides cover for your own infiltrators. Third-party bounty-hunters are also a way of reducing your own casualties.

Attacking the Enemy's capabilities is something that can be done relatively quickly, and depending on how much ethical damage we're willing to accept, could be both thorough and effective. For example, Nuking every state that's ever disagreed with us publically would be as effective and through and only marginally less appropriate than cutting off our own heads to cure migraine.

Attacking the Enemy's Capabilities when they're well-defined is something the military is good at. In this case, the number of appropriate targets is relatively small, so military action is just a small part of the whole war.

On the other hand, some of those obvious targets are very difficult, so would require a massive military effort to neutralise, so this difference may be more apparent than real.

Expect a lot more unconventional but physically destructive warfare, e.g. tracing down any "insider traders" who have made a (literal) killing on the stock market recently, and depending on the evidence, rendering them financially impotent ( a bullet in the brain is one simple way, but may not be the most appropriate ). Manipulating the stock market might be equally as effective at causing corporate collapse. Still, the financial "collateral damage" may mean that a car accident or even sudden fatal illness might be better. Trouble with such covert attacks is that true accidents in the future will be blamed on you, so it might be better to just say "Yes, we shot him, so what?" rather than weep crocadile tears.

c) Attack the Enemy's Will to Fight.

This is the epitome of warfare. You don't have to expend blood and treasure if the Enemy lacks the will to attack you - he'll do what you want.

There are two ways of doing this, one far more effective than the other. The easiest and quickest is to instill fear in the heart of the enemy. This has historically been very popular, both on a large geopolitical scale, to the smallest personal scale. It ranges from the terror of "Mutually Assured Destruction" to the terror of provoking a Jihad. It ranges from the threat to go after Saddam Hussein personally if he used Chemical Warfare in the Gulf, to the blandishments "Just obey and no-one gets hurt" used every day by Police forces, and for that matter, by the Hijackers on September 11th.

Note that credibility is the key. If the other side doesn't believe you, as happened in the flight that impacted in Pennsylvania, even unarmed civilians can and do fight effectively. If the other side believes that all they'll get if you kill them is an instant ticket to Paradise, then threats aren't credible. If you can convince them though that by their actions they've risked eternal damnation, that's another matter. This is a particularly promising avenue of attack in this case. A great effort to convince the Imams and Islamic Scholars of the world to unreservedly condemn Ground Zero and state that the perpetrators are now roasting in fire hotter than the H-bomb would likely be very effective indeed - the people concerned appear to be highly religious. In recent times, both the USA in Vietnam and the USSR in Afghanistan gave up and pulled out because they had lost the will to fight what was perceived to be a losing battle in a dubious cause.

And that last leads to the second, much harder and vastly more effective way of removing the Enemy's will to fight. The absolute pinnacle of the military art is to make the Enemy your Friend. And two can play at this game.

In order to resist, we must remain convinced that there is a clear-cut moral difference between ourselves and the Enemy. Like Pearl Harbor, Ground Zero has provided us with that.

We allowed Rwanda, and Cambodia, and Bosnia, and many others, sometimes out of fear of a larger war (The Bogistanis are Russian Allies...), sometimes out of ignorance (Bogistan? Where's that?), but sometimes out of indifference (who gives a damn about what happens in Outer Bogistan?) or worse, if they were our Allies in the "Great Game" ("If they didn't shoot those kids, the Commies would have taken over"). As the result, many of our Enemies call us hypocrites, and with some (not much, but some) justification.

We (and I do not just mean the USA here, I mean every country that lost citizens on September 11th for starters) can no longer say "Someone else's problem."

No more "business as usual". We must ratchet the filter of what is acceptable behaviour by states or organisations a few more notches. Not enough to make the different but basically decent into enemies or destroy the ideals we hold dear, but enough so great quantities of the world do not perceive us as hypocrites. If you want a soundbite "First we've got to get on God's Side, then he'll be on Our Side."

Finally, as our long-term strategy, we must try to convert at least the children of our enemies into our friends. Our weapons here are more likely to be solar-powered radios, food drops (imagine a raid on Baghdad that fought through heavy defences to drop a few thousand tonnes of baby food), education (so when Baghdad announces that the baby food is all poisoned and millions have died, it's not believed), and stern action to counter the Bad Hats. We may not be able to pick any "Good Guys" to support, but we can sure identify and destroy the torturers of the Secret Police, the thieves who take the foreign aid money, and those who terrorise their own populace. For very often there are many who remain silent out of fear.

We must bolster their courage, and give them a reasonable choice of behaviour other than to join the Enemy camp.

So much self-serving tub-thumping rubbish has been talked about "Moral Re-Armament" that the phrase is direputable. Yet that is what we have to do. We must no longer accept the right of any government to starve or massacre its people or any others.
We must also do something about our own internal injustices, racism and perjudice.

Not because it's "right", because it may not be. But to sap the feeling of smug self-righteousness that is the Enemy's main strength, and take it for ourselves.


Well, that was what I said 2 years ago. I see only a few minor omissions and amendments needed, even now.

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