(2004-06-18) Hoffman Net War

Bruce Hoffman on FourGW. In the early 1990s I was the co-author of two RAND Corporation reports that together analyzed seven historical counterinsurgency and counterterrorist campaigns, involving Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, Northern Ireland, Germany, Italy, and Rhodesia. In every case we noted that because authorities failed to detect the signs of incipient insurgency, and because the government was not sufficiently integrated with the military to mount a decisive initial response, the insurgents or terrorists had time to entrench themselves in the civilian population and to solidify their efforts... No doubt the search for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq explains some of the inadequacies in this area. Indeed, it was not until late November - when the daily pace of guerrilla attacks on U.S. troops rose to some forty a day - that many intelligence officers and analysts were reassigned from that search to focus on the insurgency... Although determining the size of the insurgency is critical to combating it, recent history has shown that to a certain degree the exact numbers are immaterial. For more than twenty years a hard core of just twenty or thirty members of the Baader-Meinhof gang terrorized West Germany - a stable country with much more sophisticated and reliable police, security, and intelligence services than Iraq is likely to have for some time. Similarly, some fifty to seventy-five Red Brigadists imposed a reign of terror on Italy; the worst period, in the late 1970s, is still referred to as the "years of lead." And for thirty years a dedicated cadre of 200 to 400 IRA gunmen and bombers frustrated the effort to maintain law and order in Northern Ireland... "Here the Baathist-Islamic divide does not exist in a practical sense. I wouldn't have thought it possible, as they were so diametrically opposed to each other during the (Saddam Hussein) regime - but it is happening." The Iraqi insurgency today appears to have no clear leader (or leadership), no ambition to seize and actually hold territory (except ephemerally, as in the recent cases of Fallujah and Najaf), no unifying ideology, and, most important, no identifiable organization. Rather, what we find in Iraq is the closest manifestation yet of "NetWar," a concept defined in 1992 by the RAND analysts John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt as unconventional warfare involving flat, segmented networks instead of the pyramidal hierarchies and command-and-control systems (no matter how primitive) that have governed traditional insurgent organizations.