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November 8, 2007
The machine versus the virus
One of the things that has concerned me about our conduct of the "war on terror" has been the asymmetry. Al-Qaeda and others operate as networks; our response was to re-arrange the bureaucracy (Department of Homeland Security). We are using a machine and industrial age mentality (as seen in the rhetorical references to the ultimate industrial age war – WWII) to fight a virus and an information age war. If, in fact, we are now in the first war of the information age, then we need to fight it differently than the wars of the industrial age.
That point was struck home reading two book reviews in the latest issue of the Economist. One was a review of a new biography of one of the leading polemist -- Architect of Global Jihad: The Life of Al Qaeda Strategist Abu Mus'ab al-Suri by Brynajar Lia (see The brains behind the bombs). As the review points out:
His life's work is a 1,600-page opus, “The Global Islamic Resistance Call”, which started to take form in the early 1990s. In it, Mr al-Suri argues that jihadis should avoid creating hierarchical structures, which are vulnerable to attack by local or American security forces, and move instead to a decentralised system of individuals or small local cells linked only by ideology.
Clearly a virus model based on a networked approach.
The second was a review of Winning the Right War: The Path to Security for America and the World by Philip H. Gordon (see Blowing cool, blowing hot):
In his five long chapters Mr Gordon makes a case for reinvigorating the toolbox employed in the cold war for the fight against terrorism. Containment, dedicated diplomacy designed to win friends and allies, investment in promoting Western moral authority and a smart defence strategy worked then, and can work again, he argues. If this approach is followed, he suggests, Islamist extremism, like communism before it, will collapse not because it was defeated militarily but because it will fail to inspire large numbers of people.
This last sound more like a strategy based on the power of intangibles.
So, maybe this isn't the first war of the information-intangible age after all. Maybe we have been fighting information age wars for a long time – we just haven’t recognized them (the Cold War being a prime example). Just as information and intangibles have played a role all along in our economy (and we are focusing on it much more right now), intangibles and information have always played a role in warfare. One of the most famous, yet overlooked, quote from Sun Tzu on the Art of War is:
to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.
To do so requires matching our organization, strategy and tactics to our adversaries. And converting adversaries into allies (“attacking their alliances” as Sun Tzu said).
Sound advice from 2500 years ago.
Posted by Ken Jarboe at November 8, 2007 8:33 AM
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