Our desperate need for a revolution in military affairs

Contemporary terrorist tactics require a radical rethinking of our society's response. Our current strategy can be summed up in two ways. First, we are projecting our military power into foreign states that conform roughly with our conception of the ideological threat posed by terrorism, the so-called "rogue states." Second, we are attempting to create the perception of tightly secured borders and air travel. Both of these efforts are not merely futile wastes of money, but are actually serving the terrorists' ends.

The military response to terrorism in the 21st century would be laughable if it didn't represent such a tragic, senseless waste of human life and society's wealth. The idea that a grossly bureaucratic, slow-moving, monolithic organization poses any threat to a decentralized, informal, ad hoc community is delusional. There is a reason why the idea of an elephant being afraid of a mouse holds such persistent appeal, regardless of whether it's true in nature. Similarly, the success of the independent Internet in the face of the combined efforts of the telecommunication industry's incumbents to control it was a foregone conclusion. The founding of the United States of America owes a debt to the advantages of the nimble vs. the monolithic, as does the most spectacular military defeat the USA ever suffered, in Vietnam.

Contemporary terrorism has gone one step further and explicitly utilizes the adverse effects of military force as a rallying call. The US attacks in the gulf states in the name of the "War on Terror" are proof that Al Qaeda is a legitimate, powerful foe of the US, one that the US fears. For an individual who has lost a livelihood or a family member to the effects of war, this makes the terrorist cause simpatico with his or her own motivations and emotions. The War on Terror yields more terrorists the more fervently it is persecuted, and the terrorists' goal of spreading fear is fulfilled.

Domestic security in the form of tougher border and airport controls has similarly paradoxical effects. Preventing a terrorist attack is quite simply impossible. There are infinite scenarios for taking over and/or taking down a flight, and infinite ways to circumvent borders. There are only finite resources for safeguarding against these scenarios. Therefore, no matter how hard we try there will always be a way for a determined individual to defeat all our security measures.

The terrorists' second and equally important goal is to cause economic damage to the West. This modern form of siege warfare is fought on a very broad battlefield. The economic harm done by 9/11 is just as important as the psychological harm, and probably has longer lasting effects. Therefore, the resources expended in a futile attempt to secure air travel and borders actually aides the terrorists.

What then are appropriate responses to modern-day terrorism? What can the West do to defend itself against the harm that terrorists seek to inflict? It can seem hopeless when faced with an enemy who is made stronger by one's attempts to weaken him, and whose goals are achieved through one's efforts to mount a defense. However, a way to defeat terrorism does exist if we are willing to take a radically different view of the challenge.

Firstly, our offense cannot take the form of any type of conventional military campaign. One counters a distributed network with another distributed network. Only a loosely organized network of semi-autonomous operatives will be able to speed and agility of the terrorist networks. These covert operatives need to match as closely as possible the profile of the target organizations, and be appropriately compensated. They also must be given the power to carry out attacks at will without pre-clearance. However, in order to maintain control over such a force, every attack must be transparently documented and justified and reviewed after the fact. If an operative takes a life that cannot be justified he or she will face criminal charges.

This force will represent a blending of military and intelligence forces operating with a new degree of autonomy and decentralization. It may be difficult for us to stomach putting such a force into the field, but if appropriate protocols are defined and maintained through oversight, the precision of its efforts will put the conventional military to shame. Most importantly, however, is the publicizing of these efforts. We want the world to know that instead of rolling tanks into their towns we have shadowy enforcers targeting only those among them who mean us harm. It is essential that the terrorists themselves know that if they engage in training or planning for an attack they make themselves targets of an unseen foe.

In fact the entire effort against terrorism should focus on increasing the cost of that strategy incurred by those who pursue it. As a methodology, terrorism is appealing because of its extremely low barriers to entry and extremely high returns on investment. A few random miscreants can merely talk amongst themselves about wanting to mix explosives from their component parts in the bathroom of a commercial aircraft and as a result Heathrow airport is virtually shut down for days and travelers are limited to three ounce bottles of any liquids kept separate in a one quart ziplock bag. Good news for the makers of toiletries and ziplock bags, perhaps, but not good news for the economy at large. The additional drag on the efficiency of air travel has incalculable knock-on effects and the public's mood as a whole is degraded by the peculiar mix of fear and disgust at our own institutional reaction to that fear.

That kind of a result for such a paltry effort makes terrorism completely irresistible to those who seek to attack the west. Until we increase the cost of their participation in terrorist plots and decrease the expected return on those plots, it is inevitable that the plotting will continue. Public statements of intent to pursue and eliminate terrorists with our own decentralized secretive forces - better trained and equipped than any terrorist cell will ever be - is the first step. The casual recruit will think twice if he believes that there may be a sniper waiting for him after the meeting of the cell. Even more effective, calibrating our response to uncovered plots and even successful acts of terrorism to minimize societal and economic disruption will introduce the only brinksmanship likely to succeed against terror tactics - to make a significant impact the terrorists will need to plan ever bigger and more elaborate attacks. The more complex the plot the more people involved, and the more likely their efforts are to being discovered by own counter-terrorism forces.

No matter how effective they may be in theory, these are not easy strategies to adopt. The use of covert operational forces to fight a foe is troublesome in a nominally open and democratic society such as ours. The spectre of death squads accountable to no-one for their use of tactics such as kidnapping, torture and assassination instantly springs to mind. However, a bureaucratic, centralized, hierarchical force will always be bested by a determined, decentralized foe using guerrilla tactics. The answer is to purposefully create a blend of the structural benefits enjoyed by the terrorist network with the oversight and accountability an open and free society deserves and demands. This is challenging simply because it has never been attempted before in military history, but there are examples from other fields that may help guide our pioneering efforts.

In computer networking for example, the Internet has defeated all other models for global telecommunications and computing, and yet it has no centralization of control or bureaucratic oversight. It accomplishes this by a clearly stated set of protocols for interactions to which all parties must adhere. Communications that do not conform to the standards of the Internet are simply discarded with little or no effect to the network as a whole. If a code of conduct were drawn up for our counter-terrorist forces to which they would be held accountable in post-operational review, that should be sufficient to ensure that our standards for human rights are not violated.

Perhaps the proposed 180 degree shift in domestic security measures is more emotionally troubling, since it admits that attacks and loss of life are inevitable and preventing them should not the priority for our investment of time and resources. It is difficult to accept the loss of any human life when presented with the possibility. Certainly if I thought there were a threat to a friend or family member I'd do everything in my power to try to deflect the risk to their life and limb. The difficulty here is that the threat is diffused and generalized across the entire population and therefore cannot be dispelled - protecting one individual or group merely shifts the threat to another until the necessary adaptations are made at which point the threat returns in a newly mutated form.

What is required is a kind of mental jujitsu where the threat's own power is turned against itself. Terrorism is only powerful because of its ability to disrupt and frighten. Take away that power through near-instantaneous recovery of normalcy after an attack and the likelihood of the attack ever happening is diminished. In other words, do away with the hours-long security checks at the airport and create instead a commercial air travel system that recovers from a disaster in hours not days, and we will have effectively defended against future attacks.

It bears mentioning that such a recovery function would serve our society equally well in the event of a natural disaster. In fact the threat of terrorism to society is best understood in comparison to the threat of a hurricane. You can't stop the wind, so you make sure that when it blows you are affected as little as possible. Terrorism is, thankfully, weaker than a force of nature - by increasing the personal risk of being a terrorist while simultaneously diminishing the rewards of their attacks, we can render the strategy ineffective.