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+Terrorist organizations are human networks, not armies. They rely on trust, relationships, and communication to operate. Military operations and bombing campaigns will be ineffective against such groups because they will not destroy the trust and connections those networks are built upon. Therefore, the most effective way to reduce terrorism is to wage a war of wits. With good intelligence gathering techniques, authorities can learn who the key terrorists are and either eliminate them or tarnish their reputations in the eyes of others in the network. Unraveling the ties that bind terrorists will win the war on terrorism. The essence of this first war of the 21st century is that it’s not like the old ones. That’s why, as $40 billion is voted for the new war on terrorism, 35,000 reservists are called up and two aircraft carrier battle groups hover near Afghanistan,1 some warriors and analysts have questions: In the Information Age, they ask, how do you attack, degrade or destroy a small, shadowy, globally distributed, stateless network of intensely loyal partisans with few fixed assets or addresses? If bombers are not the right hammer for this nail, what is? Bombers worked well in wars in which one Industrial Age military threw steel at another. World War II, for instance, was a matchup of roughly symmetrical forces. This is not true today. That’s why people who think about these things call this new conflict “asymmetric warfare.” The terrorist side is different: different organization, different methods of attack—and of defense. “It takes a tank to fight a tank. It takes a network to fight a network,” says John Arquilla, senior consultant to the international security group Rand and co-author of the forthcoming “Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime and Militancy.” He asks: “How do you attack a trust structure—which is what a network is? You’re not going to do this with Tomahawk missiles or strategic bombardment.” “It’s a whole new playing field. You’re not attacking a nation, but a network,” says Karen Stephenson, who studies everything from corporations to the U.S. Navy as if they were tribes. Trained as a chemist and anthropologist, she now teaches at Harvard and the University of London. “You have to understand what holds those networks in place, what makes them strong and where the leverage points are. They’re not random connections,” she says. Human networks are distinct from electronic ones. They are not the Internet. They are political and emotional connections among people who must trust each other in order to function, like Colombian drug cartels and Spanish Basque separatists and the Irish Republican Army. Not to mention high-seas pirates, smugglers of illegal immigrants, and rogue brokers of weapons of mass destruction. But how to a network? The good news is that in the last decade we have developed a whole new set of weapons to figure that out. |