Military Affairs

The Networked Jihad: Parasitic on Developed World Technology, Information, Ideas

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I recently posted about Jihadi theorist and practitioner Abu Musab al-Suri, in response to a recent review essay about a biography of al-Suri.

Zenpundit opined that al-Suri appears to be the Islamic terrorist movement’s “John Arquilla, William Lind and Louis Beam rolled into one”, and that “he probably would have made a fine blogger had he not also been – well – a sociopathic nihilist.” Agreed, though I would expressly add “homicidal, sociopathic nihilist”.

Several facts stood out about as-Suri. One was that his politico-military thought is not so much Islamic, and certainly not traditionalist, as a mélange of Islamic themes mixed with other revolutionary and radical thinking originating in the West. Also, he encouraged a massively decentralized Jihad, cell-based, self-starting, networked but not hierarchical, with al Qaeda as a source of inspiration and doctrine but not command and control. Only such a hyper-dispersed effort could wage a bottom-up struggle against the USA and its allies, which enjoy so many advantages in terms of surveillance and destructive power.

With this on the mind, I was therefore struck by the following passage from a review-essay which discusses Olivier Roy’s Globalized Islam: The Search for the New Ummah (which I have not read):

Islamic militancy has become infused with Third World theories, Marxism, fascism, and nationalism. It cannot escape the whirlwind of ideas that has drifted over the decades into the Middle East. All militant websites seemed to urge for a peripheral jihad in the frontiers (Chechnya, the Philippines island of Mindanao, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kashmir) and for an imaginary ummah (Islamic society) in which they hold dominion under the guise of piety. He points out that many of these websites originate not from the periphery but from Europe, Malaysia and even North America areas in which there is access to technology. This is a key observation: for the Islamic militants, a cell requires access to free societies and western technologies to propagate and acquire tools for their rejectionist movements.

The Jihad cannot be based in the lands of the existing Ummah. If it is limited to the technical means, and even the intellectual means, available there, it is doomed. First, it would be trapped in a backwater, waging a struggle against the ruthless police states of the “Near Enemy”, where it has already repeatedly suffered defeat. Second, without the network-enabling technology which is densely available in the developed world, as well as useful non-Islamic-derived ideas, an effective strategy such as the one al-Suri was seeking cannot be developed and executed.

The developed countries can only be effectively attacked to the extent their enemies are permitted a lodgment within their own borders.

Sending Western troops to fight Jihadis in Waziristan may or may not make the USA and its Allies more secure. But rooting out the Jihadis in New York, Detroit, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Munich is essential.

UPDATE: My copy of Architect of Global Jihad: The Life of Al Qaeda Strategist Abu Mus’ab Al-Suri just arrived. Flipping through it, I must say it looks very good. Perhaps, once I’m done with it, yet a third post will be in order.

Visualcy at Complex Terrain Laboratory

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Recently, I agreed to join Complex Terrain Laboratory, a British “think tank 2.0” as a contributor along with Matt Armstrong , Tim Stevens and Michael Tanji. There is a good synthesis there at CTLab between full-time professional academics and horizontal thinking bloggers and, I think, the potential to become an intellectual hub for intersecting fields.

The following represents my first post at CTLab which I am cross-posting here at Chicago Boyz:

“Visualcy and the Human Terrain”

COIN and public diplomacy alike tend to encounter significant barriers to effective communication between the state actor and the intended audience. In part, this is due to gaps in cultural intelligence that will only be remediated by degrees with the careful advice of Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and the experience derived from an extended immersion in another society. The other aspect of the problem is that the target audience often has greater complexity and cognitive heterogeneity than the Western society from which the warrior or diplomat hails.

As a result of public education, the rise of mass-media and commercial advertising, Western nations and Japan, some earlier but all by mid-20th century, became relatively homogenized in the processing of information as well as having a dominant vital "consensus" on cultural and political values with postwar Japan probably being the most extreme example. The range between elite and mass opinion naturally narrowed as more citizens shared similar outlooks and the same sources of information, as did the avenues for acceptable dissent. A characteristic of modern society examined at length by thinkers as diverse as Ortega y Gasset, Edward Bernays, Marshall McLuhan and Alvin Toffler.

The situation is more complicated in states and regions enduring the legacy of colonialism and failed state-centric (often Marxist) national development policies. Here the educational and technological gap between a very sophisticated, Western educated elite and a rural villager or tribal member may be exceedingly wide. Basic literacy levels may be low enough to leave substantial portions of the dominant population group outside of the literary tradition and reliant upon word of mouth, radio, television and – increasingly – images on the internet via handheld mobile devices.

These are broad generalizations, of course. Western societies contain cultural "holdouts" like the Amish or digitally deprived underclass populations who are relatively disconnected from the mainstream and some developing countries have high, even enviable, levels of educational success and popular literacy. Nor are Western societies as homgenous in terms of information flows as they were two decades ago. But because images have powerful cognitive responses in the brain, the "Visualcy" effect is a factor that cannot be ignored in COIN, IO or public diplomacy. Images will have broad societal effects – at times akin to that of a tsunami.

Interestingly enough, despite complaints by American conservatives regarding the political bias of news outlets like al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya, these organizations are packaging news in the familiar "Pulitzerian frame" in which mass media have been structuring information for over a century. Effectively, habituating their audience to a Western style (if not content) of thinking and information processing, with all of the advantages and shortcomings in terms of speed and superficiality that we associate with television news broadcasting. This phenomena, along with streaming internet video content like Youtube and – very, very, soon – mass-based Web 2.0 video social networks will overlay the aforementioned complexity in regard to the range of education and literacy.

What to do ?

While acceptance of a global panopticon paradigm is unpleasant, due to decreasing costs for increasingly powerful technology and web-based platforms, this trend is irreversible in the medium term. Concepts and messages to be successfully communicated to the broadest possible audience will have to be thought of strategically by statesmen, diplomats and military officers with images as starting points, followed by words rather than the reverse ( to the extent that images are currently considered at all, except after some PR debacle). In the long term, greater prosperity and rising general education levels in developing countries may blunt the negative political effects of "visualcy".

Or, given that the social media revolution is just getting underway, it may not.

Abu Musab al-Suri: Theorist of Modern Jihad

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I had seen a several references to the recent book Architect of Global Jihad: The Life of al-Qaida Strategist Abu Musab al-Suri by Brynjar Lia, and I thought it sounded interesting. However, I was inspired to order the book by an excellent recent review essay. I strongly suggest you read the review, even rather than reading this post.

Osama bin Laden is the name and face we typically associate with the global Islamist terrorist movement. But bin Laden may be the man of yesterday. Al-Suri may ultimately be seen as the superior theoretician and strategist for the ongoing militant jihad against the USA, its allies, and the “near enemy”, i.e. the existing governments of the Arab Middle East. The reviewer describes al-Suri as “al-Qaida’s most formidable and far-sighted military strategist.”

The review gives an overview of al-Suri’s extraordinary life as a militant, and as the author of numerous books.

What I found most interesting was the parallel between al-Suri’s thought, and some of the current thinking among Western military writers on decentralized and networked warfare.

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The Royal Navy

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One of my favorite Seinfeld episodes has George getting into a fight with a clown who doesn’t remember “Bozo” the clown, his favorite. The clown shoots back at George, saying:

“You’re living in the past, man!”

I had the same sentiment while reading my favorite magazine, “Strategy and Tactics“. This magazine covers military history and related articles from ancient times to the present day. Besides having great articles, the magazine also has very few advertisements, which means that it is quick and to the point. While we don’t shill for anyone at the blog, we do promote what we like, and every year I buy a subscription for myself, Dan and now Gerry on the blog (Gerry – if I never told you that, this is the reason for that yellow package you receive monthly).

The article I immediately jump to is called “The First Arms race: German-British Naval Rivalry and the Opening of the Great War.” This article covers the fascinating time from the 1890’s until the early years of WW1 when Germany attempted to build an ocean going fleet that could challenge Britain. The box on the upper left is a brief biography of Tirpitz, the “mastermind” of German naval power.

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Book Review – The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

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I have mentioned several times that the books that I have been reading about WW2 are no longer ones that, as Lex Green so aptly put it, have the usual arrows pointing toward the Volga, Normandy and Berlin. Most books that I have been reading are very narrowly focused and are about a single phase of the war, such as a person, place, weapon, or similar items. Reading books that specialize in certain aspects on a very minute level is helping me put together the larger events in a much more interesting way. Reading about Barbarossa is one thing, but reading about the partisan resistance, or the role of animals in that operation is quite another.

Along these lines, I have just finished up a book by Adam Tooze called The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. This book is about WW2 from an economic point of view. The book doesn’t really talk about generalship, tank tactics, or anything else military except in economic terms.

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