IP: Disconnect the Dots -- Maybe We Can't Cut Off Terror's Head, but We Can Take Out Its Nodes

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41015-2001Sep16.html

Disconnect the Dots
Maybe We Can't Cut Off Terror's Head, but We Can Take Out Its Nodes
By Joel Garreau

Washington Post Staff Writer

Monday, September 17, 2001; Page C01

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, 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.

<snip>



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