Have Drones (and Cyber . . . and SOF) Revolutionized Warfare? (Part Deux)

Making a point similar to Hsia and Sperli, last week former NATO commander Admiral James Stavridis suggested in a recent Foreign Policy.com essay that, together, unmanned vehicles, cybercapabilities, and special operations forces comprise a “New Triad” comparable the Cold War “strategic triad” of delivery systems for nuclear weapons. “Each has an important role to play,” Stavridis says, “but taken together, the sum of their impacts will be far greater than that of each of the parts when used alone.” Among his policy recommendations is that all U.S. cyberforces owned by the individual services be merged into a single organization modeled after U.S. Special Operations Command.

Although the Triad analogy is a bit strained, I find Stavridis’ recommendations/points for further analysis were generally sound. Apparently, the Lexington Institute’s Loren Thompson disagrees . . . strongly. Thompson accuses Stavridis of believing “mass and firepower have had their day,” and asks (rhetorically, one hopes) “Is it really possible that senior military officers believe such nonsense?” Unfortunately, I think Thompson badly mischaracterizes Stavridis’ argument as a straw man to argue against strategic and technological innovation.

Yes, Stavridis – and Hsia, Sperli, and many others – believe that cyber, unmanned vehicles, and SOF (engaging in both kinetic and Foreign Internal Defense-like missions) will be increasingly important in future warfare, or strategic operations below the level of major combat. But this assessment stems from a few observations:

- Because of America's enormous advantage in conventional capabilities, potential adversaries will seek to weaken us through asymmetric means, i.e. cyber or insurgency/terrorism;

- As demonstrated in Afghanistan and Iraq (post-liberation), and in Lebanon in 2006, mass and firepower are in and of themselves insufficient to defeat irregular threats;

- The most effective way to counter a cyber threat is with equal or greater cyber capabilities (both defense and offense). The fact that a catastrophic cyberattack could cripple our ability to retaliate is what makes a cyber arms race potentially so unstable (any security studies academics reading this will nod their heads understanding the dangers of a significant first-mover advantage, which makes developing a second-cyber-strike capability vital);

- The most effective way thus far to attack a decentralized network in allied or U.S. occupied countries has proven to be SOF raids against leadership nodes in conjunction with the development of competent indigenous forces (which, to be sure, can be effectively supported with larger troop formations to protect the civilian population and gain the trust/intelligence necessary to perform the first two tasks);

- The most effective way thus far to attack a decentralized network in ungoverned or hostile territory has been UAV strikes against leadership nodes;

- Financial constraints due to America's massive structural debt, and the American public’s fatigue from the last decade of near continuous combat, will restrict our ability to engage in large-scale military interventions for less-than-vital interests.

Which of these contentions would Thompson dispute? Thompson says “Try flying a Predator over Syria, and see how long it lasts?” Well, the Israelis disabled Syrian air defenses through a cyberattack in 2007 and were able to successfully eliminate a nuclear weapons facility. Thompson says “Try using special operators to blunt a North Korean attack” across the DMZ, even though Stavridis never suggested they were a substitute for such a mission. One could easily counter “Try disrupting a terrorist plot by capturing/killing a jihadist leader with 100,000 troops that will take weeks to deploy to inhospitable terrain and produce hundreds of casualties.”

Again, this isn’t to say that large conventional forces won’t be required in the future and shouldn’t be maintained, but rather that the plethora of strategic threats America faces requires a range of more surgical military options than simply the sledgehammer of armored BCTs that take months to deploy in a world where threats emerge rapidly. (We won't even get into the problem of anti-access capabilities here . . . )

Incidentally, a much more balanced and effective critique of my argument above, unsurprisingly, comes from Major General H.R. McMaster, a highly successful counterinsurgent commander in Iraq, who challenged the potential over-reliance on Special Ops raiders and proxy forces in recent remarks at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. I highly recommend reading the transcript and anything else McMasters writes, as he is likely this generation's premier soldier/intellectual (or at least in the top three).

Have Drones (and Cyber) Revolutionized Warfare? (Part 1)

Tim Hsia and Jared Sperli, Army reservists and ROTC instructors, wrote an interesting piece in The New York Times Monday suggesting that cyberwarfare and drones represent a revolution in in military affairs similar to what the aircraft carrier meant to naval warfare. “Historians,” they write, “will look back and see advancements in cyberwarfare and robotics as the first two revolutions in military affairs of the 21st century.”

Are they correct?

In his classic work, Arms and Influence, Thomas Schelling argued that the basic nature of warfare in the civilized world has remained constant. Roughly speaking, two adversaries deploy forces against one another with the implied threat of targeting the others’ civilian population and engage in combat/deadly force. Once one side’s forces are either sufficiently weakened through attrition or outmaneuvered so that they unable to protect their noncombatants, that side surrenders on the political question at stake that Clausewitz argues is at the root of all wars. (Or something like that . . . it has been a long time since comps back in grad school).

Thus, whether the killing is done with clubs and spears or tanks and bombers, the nature of war remains essentially unchanged, only the means of gaining the strategic leverage to threaten the other side’s population evolves. (i.e. Tanks using blitzkrieg tactics could initially get behind enemy lines faster than any operational counterstroke; Planes from aircraft carriers could threaten to decimate an enemy fleet without facing return fire; Nuclear ICBMs could eliminate entire civilian populations without having to first defeat the adversary’s intervening military forces). If we strictly interpret Schelling's thesis (with which, granted, not everyone may agree) then tanks and carriers represent evolutions rather than revolutions, since they could be eventually countered by anti-tank weapons/defenses, or by other carriers. Conversely, since strategic defenses against nuclear weapons have yet to be perfected (other than deterrence through an assured second-strike capability), this is arguably the only truly revolutionary weapon-to-date. . .

. . . until cyberwarfare, that is.

But first, let’s consider UAVs/drones. Here, it is important to distinguish the technology itself from their current operational/strategic use. I (and others) have argued that properly understood, UAVs are best understood as an evolutionary leap in the technology of conducting air strikes, wherein their size allows them greater loiter time than conventional bombers, and thus both greater discrimination and precision in target selection (as well as not putting human pilots at risk). Theoretically, however, they are susceptible to the same countermeasures as manned crafts, only we are using them against adversaries lacking sophisticated air defenses or technology to jam a sustained drone campaign. If we attempted to use drones on a massive scale against a more capable conventional enemy (i.e. Iran, for example), it is unclear whether they would achieve the same effects. (We could obviously jam enemy air defenses, as we did in Iraq 2003, or as the Israelis did before bombing Syria's nuclear weapons site in 2007, but that further emphasizes the similarity to manned aircraft). This is not to say they would not be extremely useful in such conflicts and reduce airman casualties significantly, but the presence of large numbers of UAVs would not necessarily revolutionize the fundamental tenets of close air support or strategic bombing.

However, UAVs do provide the perfect operational capability for a sustained targeted killing campaign against al-Qa’ida and its affiliates. Two U.S. administrations have chosen a decapitation strategy because the jihadists who comprise the terror network have a such a fanatical belief in the righteousness of their cause that – in Schelling’s terms – there is no civilian population we could sufficiently threaten or conduct punitive strikes against that would dissuade them from their course, as they would merely shrug these fatalities off as “martyrs” for the holy cause. Thus, even if you believe that we are more likely to be militarily engaged with groups of supranational non-state actors - or even superempowered individuals than conventionally armed nation-states in the future - then it is the nature of the adversary that is driving the anti-Schelling/anti-Clausewitzian nature of the Drone War, not the nature of the technology.

Now, if we fought an adversary with its own drone capability (or robot battalions, if you will), and the primary battles were drone-versus-drone with the loser surrendering on the political question as soon as its drones were defeated in order to avoid human casualties (sort of like the original Star Trek episode “A Taste of Armageddon,” only without the disintegration booths), that would be revolutionary. This is exactly what true cyberwar would look like, as theoretically cyberweapons could be used to attack an adversary’s civilian population by devastating their infrastructure through cyberattacks on dams, electrical grids, air traffic control, etc, without ever having to defeat their tanks, bombers, or massed infantry. Worse, such an attack could theoretically be conducted by non-state actors (i.e. al-Qa’ida investing in computer engineers rather than chemical/biological weapons experts; or a completely nihilist offshoot of a group akin to Anonymous or LulzSec), could be conducted in milliseconds rather than even the half-hour it takes for a missile’s intercontinental flight, and in theory could significantly degrade the ability to conduct a retaliatory strike (presuming there is a reasonable certainty of attribution, which is far from a given).

That is a revolution in warfare.

Fortunately, thus far only a few actors (i.e. the United States, Russia, China, and maybe Israel, to name a few) possess the resources/capability to launch such an attack. This not only makes attribution (and consequently deterrence) easier, it also means that -- as was the case during the Cold War -- the political questions in dispute are less likely to rise to the level requiring full-scale conflict. This is a good thing, to be sure.

But I don’t think there are any security experts out there who believe that if the political tensions were elevated enough to justify military conflict (i.e. a full-scale Chinese invasion of Taiwan or another American ally in Asia) that the conflict wouldn’t first erupt as a cyberwar before American and Chinese aircraft ever came within sight of one another.

The soldiers on Eminiar VII (or was it Vendikar?) knew about revolutions in military affairs . . . not so much about stylish headgear.

Boston's Dragnet and the Art of the Manhunt

Following up on yesterday's post on the role of facial recognition technology in the hunt for Boston Marathon bombers, this April piece in Popular Mechanics discussing manhunting tactics with retired police officer and author Jack Schonely is worth revisiting.

Although I still maintain that domestic and strategic manhunts are not wholly analogous, I think this piece reinforces three points I've made in my work:

 

1- Troop strength is not determinative of success in manhunts. In the day after the initial shootout with the Tsarnaev brothers, authorities had thousands of officers sweeping the contained area in Watertown. But Dzhokar had already broken out of that area, and if he had just kept moving might very well have evaded capture that day/night. (Of course, if the brothers had had half a brain between them they would have been in Canada or some other urban area by the time their photos appeared everywhere instead of partying in Dartmouth, MA);

 

2 - Technology is of limited value in strategic manhunts. Schonely, author of Apprehending Fleeing Suspects admits that "a heat signature [from Forward Looking Infrared] is rarely clear enough to identify as a human being" and that the incorporation of air units into manhunts can make patrolmen "overconfident."

 

3 - Human intelligence is still of primary importance. It was the tip from a homeowner regarding the cover on his boat that led the air units to the driveway outside the containment area in the first place, and more importantly, the Tsarnaevs do not appear to have had some place they could go where people would have voluntarily helped them to hide (in Watertown, at least).

 

Again, I hesitate to make this case too strongly, especially because the Tsarnaev's made so many missteps. But a cursory glance certainly does highlight some commonalities that may be useful for commanders and policymakers in the future.  

Al-Shabab Live Tweets Attack

Less than a week after I posted about the debate as to whether or not to shut down terrorist groups' Twitter accounts, Somalia-based al-Qa'ida affiliate al-Shabab live tweeted their suicide attack on a UN compound in Mogadishu yesterday that killed eight people and wounded an unknown number of Somalis.

The tweets themselves range from the intriguing (albeit grossly inaccurate) live accounts of the attack, to the bizarre taunting of the UN representative, Nicholas Kay. But this incident suggests that the jihadist networks are still far ahead of the U.S. Government in terms of using social media for propaganda strategic communications purposes.

"Could Facial Recognition Technology Have Caught the Boston Bombers?"

In a word, no.

Although the wide array of surveillance photos in Copley Square played a role in apprehending Dzhokar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, advanced technology was not the key to the manhunt, as a bombing victim identified the brothers from a series of photos, which were subsequently released to the public to provide tips (a.k.a. HUMINT) that led the investigators to the brothers.

As Sean Gallagher pointed out in an Ars Technica piece last month: “For people who understand how facial recognition works, this comes as no surprise. Despite advances in the technology, systems are only as good as the data they’re given to work with.” And despite what CSI or NCIS may have led us to believe, “Video from a gas station surveillance camera or a police CCTB camera on some lamppost cannot suddenly be turned into a high-resolution image of a suspect’s face that can then be thrown against a drivers’ license photo database to spit out an instant match.”

A more optimistic take on the topic comes from ForeignPolicy.com’s Joshua Keating, who while admitting that old fashioned detective work was the key to tracking the Tsarnaevs, “this is pretty new technology and . . . we may be getting closer to this kind of thing actually being useful.”

Keating’s optimism is based on a study by Michigan State computer scientists Joshua Klontz and Anil Jain testing whether existing facial recognition software could have identified the Tsarnaevs based on the security camera images taken just before the bombings by adding three headshots of the each brother to a database of more than a million mugshots. When the database was filtered to only look at Caucasian men in their 20s (for some reason, Tamerlan’s photo seemed to draw a lot of female matches . . . which is ironic given his history of domestic violence and fundamentalist beliefs about gender relations), the program produced one bull’s eye based on Dzhokar’s high school graduation photo.  

But this is a thin reed upon which to express hope that this technology will significantly alter the tactics of manhunts, whether domestic or strategic. First, Dzhokar’s school picture would not actually have been available to law enforcement, and the headshot from a driver’s license photo did not place higher than 19th in any of the searches. Conversely, although NeoFace 3.1 did produce one correct match, another young man’s mugshot not only produced a bull’s eye, but was also ranked the third closest match against the other two photos of Dzhokar. So the facial recognition technology did produce a good match, only it was of the wrong person. Finally, because Tamerlan was wearing sunglasses on April 15th, his own mugshot from his 2009 domestic violence arrest did not place higher than 116,342nd as a match.

In other words, no matter how well the technology is developed, simple countermeasures such as wearing sunglasses will likely impede its effectiveness.

Gallagher notes that under the best circumstances, facial recognition can be extremely accurate, but to do so "almost always requires some skilled guidance from humans." This calls to mind former Delta Force commander Pete Blaber’s admonition about relying on technology in manhunts: “The reality and complexity of life virtually guarantee there will never be” an all-purpose technological panacea for finding people. “Instead, these types of capabilities should be looked at as part of an overall system. A buffet of capabilities that could be used in combination with our guys working the situation on the ground to assist in the vexing challenge of locating a wanted man.”

Data Mining and Manhunts

This is not a post about how America is slowly descending into fascism, or about how Edward Snowden is a traitor who has made it easier for terrorists to murder U.S. citizens.* Although I think the debate over where to draw the line between civil liberties and national security is an important one and, given the necessary vagaries of the topic, one in which intelligent people can reasonably disagree, that is not my purpose here.

Instead, what fascinates me about the NSA’s PRISM program is the question of how it purportedly helps to locate and subsequently apprehend individuals deemed a threat to national security. As anybody who has read my book (or this blog, or this interview), I’m a bit of a skeptic when it comes to the role of technology in strategic manhunts. Although intelligence is the critical variable in such campaigns, I argue that history shows that most technologies can be defeated by countermeasures (i.e. stay off the phone; don’t go outside in the daytime and wave at the UAV overhead), and that human intelligence drawn from inside the target’s network or the local population are more critical to operational success.

That being said, as more histories of the targeted killing campaigns which decimated al-Qa’ida in Iraq and the Jaysh al-Mahdi from 2006-2008 in Iraq become available (i.e. Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker’s Counterstrike and General Stanley McChrystal’s memoir), it is clear that the use of metadata compiled from “pocket liter” found on insurgents was a critical factor in hunting those networks' leadership and operatives. So given that I’m always aware (and hopeful) that there may be some facet of manhunting I’m not privy to, for the moment I’m more curious about the mechanics of how metadata in general, and PRISM’s datamining in particular, relates to the kinetic aspect of finding/fixing terrorists than I am about the privacy-versus-security debate.

Last week Sean Gallagher of Ars Technica wrote a piece discussing the history and technical aspects of how the NSA collects “big data.” Be warned, this being Ars Technica, it gets really technical (i.e. how does one even begin to conceptualize petabytes, exabytes, and zettabytes worth of information?) Yet even if you are not a “ones and zeros” geek, Gallagher makes a crucial point at the outset, warning:

“One organization’s data centers hold the contents of much of the visible Internet – and much of it that isn’t visible just by clicking your way around. It has satellite imagery of much of the world, and ground-level photography of homes and businesses and government installations tied into a geospatial database that is cross-indexed to petabytes of information about individuals and organizations. And its analytics systems process the Web search requests, e-mail messages, and other electronic activities of hundreds of millions of people.”

Of course, Gallagher says, he is talking about Google.

A more practical explanation of how metadata is used in finding terrorists is provided by J.M. Berger's ForeignPolicy.com essay, "Evil in a Haystack",. Berger presents a hypothetical of a captured al-Qa’ida operative’s cellphone, which includes the number of a terrorist fundraiser in Yemen, and then takes us step-by-step as to how the terrorist fundraiser’s social network is recreated through metadata. In doing so, Berger sets out both the tactical and strategic challenges that come with uncovering 50,000 second-order contacts (i.e. Do you investigate the 79 numbers that called the original number, the 24 mathematically most important members of that set, or all 47,923 numbers that called the 79 numbers?) Similarly, he lays out the ethical gray areas associated with such searches. For example:

“How much contact can an analyst have with a U.S. person’s data before it becomes a troublesome violation of privacy? Is it a violation to load a phone record into a graph if the analyst never looks at it individually? Is it a violation to look at a number individually if you don’t associate a name? Is it a violation to associate a name if you never take any additional investigative steps?”

Berger rightfully concludes” “None of these questions is simple or easy. None of them lends itself to polling or punditry. They aren’t easy to discuss in a reasoned and accurate manner during a two-minute TV hit or on the floor of the House of Representatives.”

Also illuminating is Duke University Sociology Professor Kiernan Healy’s blog post, “Using Metadata to Find Paul Revere,” which provides a more specific (if somewhat tongue-in-cheek) case study of how some relatively simple mathematics can shed light on a social network and illuminate who the key nodes in that network are if . . . you know, if you wanted to eliminate them. Healy allows that relying exclusively on data rather than the content/context of these connections may create “the prospect of discovering suggestive but ultimately incorrect or misleading patterns,” – similarly, Berger notes that targeting American militia groups might just inadvertently create a database of legal sellers. (Deputy Attorney General James Cole admitted as much in congressional testimony yesterday.)But whereas Healy simply states “this problem would surely be greatly ameliorated by more and better metadata,” Berger suggests that increasing the size of a dataset creates “ever-more challenging complexities.”

Thus, so far as strategic manhunts are concerned, the importance of metadata to manhunting appears to be its social network mapping function in determining which individuals to target or, alternatively, with whom a targeted individual may seek sanctuary. (A similar link analysis was crucial to capturing Saddam Hussein, although it was created as the result of interrogation and photo albums rather than through metadata). But it likely is merely one of several tools rather than the panacea "Big Data's" apostles claim.

After all, if PRISM were a cure-all for manhunts, then why wasn't the government able to track down Snowden himself when they hunted for him in the days before his leaks were reported?!?

Ironically, the one manhunt in which metadata appears not to have helped was the hunt for NSA leaker Edward Snowden . . .

* Okay, I can’t resist making three points on Snowden. Even if the privacy advocates are 100% correct about the dangers of PRISM – which I doubt they are – they should be careful about lionizing Snowden given that:

1- Many of his initial claims (i.e. “I could wiretap the President’s phone if I wanted") have proven to be false;

2- Although he claims his leak was motivated by idealism to protect Americans' civil liberties, his most recent revelations have been about spying on foreign leaders at the G-8 and G-20 summits? How exactly does such espionage pose a threat to the privacy of U.S. citizens?

3- I have a little trouble taking somebody seriously who wraps himself in a martyr’s cloak, saying “I’m prepared to face the consequences of my action,” and then flees to China (which surely he must know has far less regard for civil liberties than even the most paranoid conception of the United States).

And we won’t even go into the question of trusting the judgment of a man who leaves a pole-dancing girlfriend behind in Hawaii . . .

CNN: al-Nusra Front Now Best Equipped al-Qa'ida Affiliate

Presumably, this is why Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is so eager to claim ownership of the al-Nusra Front for the Islamic State of Iraq, although sadly, even if left to its own resources, al-Qa'ida in Iraq doesn't seem to be lagging in the brutal, sectarian murder department.

"Tora Bora Reconsidered" in Joint Forces Quarterly

My article, "Tora Bora Reconsidered: Lessons from 125 Years of Strategic Manhunts" in the forthcoming (July 2013) issue of Joint Forces Quarterly has been posted online. (The journal itself comes out next week). As the abstract notes:

The allegation that Osama bin Laden was not apprehended in timely fashion because of insufficient troops deployed to Tora Bora is belied by the experience of a dozen strategic manhunts involving deployment of U.S. forces dating back to 1885-86. In fact, the need for surprise often means smaller forces are the ideal. Moreover, the human terrain is a bigger factor than the physical terrain. The views of the native population shape three variables that largely determine the success of strategic manhunts: human intelligence, help from indigenous forces, and whether the object of the hunt can find sanctuary by crossing a border. These factors were against U.S. forces in December 2001. The key would have been stronger links with Pashtun resources.

I actually submitted this back in November 2011, and assumed it had been rejected until the editors contacted me this February saying it had been accepted but was still under security review. What appears in JFQ is the redacted version, as DOD decided they couldn't release some details that Langley had already cleared for publication in Gary Berntsen and George Tenet's memoirs. Then again, if the AP is correct, apparently members of the Obama administration have had a problem keeping details of the hunt for bin Laden secret, at least when it came to Hollywood directors/writers. 

Today in Manhunting History: June 17, 1993 -- The Raid on Aideed's Compound

After the AC-130 attacks from June 12-14, Mogadishu was quiet on June 15 and 16. But at 1:30AM on June 17, AC-130s began striking weapons storage sites and knocking out selected roadblocks in southern Mogadishu. The PSYOPS teams’ speakers warned anyone around Aideed’s compound to drop their weapons, raise their arms, and walk to the main road. “Evacuate immediately, these buildings will be destroyed in 10 minutes . . . You have five minutes to evacuate immediately, immediately . . .” This announcement was followed by warning shots from a 40mm cannon. Approximately 30-40 people left Aideed’s compound before 105mm guns fired at targets in the area of the warlord’s house.

Aideed was finally being directly targeted.

At 4AM hundreds of Pakistani, Moroccan, Italian, and French troops lined up for the ground assault, supported by U.S. liaison officers and American attack helicopters. A tight cordon was in place by 5:45AM, and two Pakistani infantry battalions kicked in the gates and assaulted the housing complexes of Aideed, Ato, and Jess. The international forces conducted a house-to-house search of Aideed’s compound. Although reporters later found the pink earplugs he used to block the previous nights’ PSYOPS’ broadcasts, the warlord had slipped away. Local legend had Aideed escaping under the UN troops’ noses on a donkey cart, wrapped up in a sheet like a corpse.

As the Pakistanis cleared the objective, however, the Moroccans began to take fire on the outer perimeter, engaging in a four hour firefight complicated by the Somali use of women and children to shield the militiamen. Just before 10:30AM, a recoilless rifle shell disabled the Moroccan command vehicle and killed the regimental commander. It took until 6:30PM to finish clearing all the shattered target buildings. In the end, the operation only managed to damage Aideed’s house at the cost of five UN troops killed and 46 wounded, and at least 100 Somalis killed.

One senior Clinton administration official who participated in the President’s decision to mount the attacks acknowledged “We didn’t plan to kill him, but the president knew that if something fell on Aideed and killed him, no tears would be shed.” Failing to achieve this, the Administration chose to portray the operations as a success nevertheless. Jonathan Howe proclaimed a “tremendous victory,” and President Clinton declared: “The military back of Aideed has been broken.”

Muhammad Farah Aideed was directly targeted by U.S. forces more than three months before Task Force Ranger's famous operation depicted in "Black Hawk Down"

Happy Anniversary (Okay, Not Really) Ayman al-Zawahiri!

Two years ago today Ayman al-Zawahiri was formally named Osama bin Laden's successor as leader of al-Qa'ida, and hence became arguably the number one target of U.S. forces in the War on Terror.

How is the not-so-good doctor (Zawahiri was a physician prior to taking up jihad full-time) fairing?

According to CNN's Peter Bergen, Zawahiri's May 23 memo to the leaders of the Iraqi and Syrian wings of al-Qa’ida, in which he ordered the merger of the two branches to be dissolved, “demonstrates Zawahiri considers himself and the al Qa’ida core to be still relevant and very much in charge of the global jihadist movement.”

At the end of the article, Bergen hedges a bit, noting: “It isn’t clear to what extent al-Qa’ida’s affiliates in Syria and Iraq will actually pay attention to the directives from Zawahiri.” This is prescient of Bergen, as yesterday the Associated Press reported: AL QAEDA’S LEADER IN IRAQ DEFIES BOSS OVER SYRIA FIGHT. AP quotes Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as saying: “The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant will continue. We will not compromise and we will not give up.”

In other words, although al-Qa’ida core still exists and still believes it is operationally relevant, without the unifying figure of bin Laden it is having a difficult time combating the centrifugal pressures that is leading to splits such as the one in Iraq/Syria, and Mokhtar Belmokhtar’s split from AQIM.

As I've noted before, it is unclear whether such a fragmentation would make the various splinter groups more dangerous from an operational standpoint, or less threatening from a strategic standpoint due to the inability to coordinate operations.

Sorry, Ayman, no one said being in charge was easy.

Today in Manhunting History -- June 16, 2003: Capturing Saddam's Shadow

As the nascent insurgency coalesced in increasing attacks against coalition forces and Iraqi civilians in the summer of 2003, graffiti praising Saddam began to emerge in Iraq’s Sunni Triangle, bearing messages such as “Saddam is still our leader” and “Saddam the hero will be back.” CENTCOM commander General John Abizaid acknowledged: “It’s important even to know if he’s alive or dead; and if he’s alive, it’s important either to capture or kill him.” Ambassador Jerry Bremer agreed: “It is important to kill Saddam or capture him because his continued uncertain state has allowed people to play on that uncertainty and make the argument that, in some fashion, the Ba’athists would come back.” This sentiment was perhaps best expressed by an old Bedouin near Tikrit, who warned soldiers of the 4th Infantry Division that “Unless you catch Saddam and show his head to the people, they won’t believe he is gone. This will not end.”

An apparent breakthrough in the hunt for Saddam occurred on June 16, when U.S. forces captured Abid Hamid Mahmud al-Tikriti. Al-Tikriti, sometimes called “Saddam’s Shadow,” was the dictator’s personal secretary, and as the ace of diamonds on the deck of cards, the fourth-most wanted man in Iraq behind Saddam and his sons. Although the Associated Press declared “Captured Iraqi May Know Fate of Saddam,” al-Tikriti told interrogators he and Saddam’s sons had separated from the dictator in April after Saddam became convinced they could survive longer apart.

"Saddam's Shadow" captured June 16, 2003

The War on Terror Online

One of these days I hope to write a longer piece pointing out the one truly dangerous intellectual misconception at the heart of President Obama's NDU speech last month, specifically the notion that "all wars end," and that consequently so will the current war against al-Qa'ida once we leave Afghanistan having defeated al-Qa'ida. (The war in Afghanistan won't end when we leave Afghanistan, but that is a different post for another time). As much as I wish the President were right, it shows a frighteningly shallow understanding of who/what we are fighting.

Short version: almost since Islam's founding there have been individuals and groups who have chosen the most extreme interpretation of its scriptures possible and used this interpreation to justify violence against all non-believers (i.e. Jews, Christians, Atheists, Jews a second time just for good measure), and other Muslims who don't subscribe to their absolutist tenets. Examples of this include the original Assassins in the 12th century, Ibn Tammiya in the 14th century, and Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab in the 18th century. More modern versions include Sayyid Qutb, Mullah Omar, and Osama bin Laden.

In the old days if a Caliph wanted to suppress a radical movement, all he had to do was surround the offending village, kill everybody inside, and ensure that every scroll containing the forbidden teachings was destroyed. Yet even if the United States wanted to use such a scorched earth strategy (which we obviously don't because of its inherent immorality . . . i.e. we did not nuke Afghanistan post-9/11), given modern communications technology such as the internet we could never suppress the ideology completely. Hence the reason a lot of analysts (myself included) warned after Abbottabad that although bin Laden was dead, Bin Ladenism was still a threat.

Thus, the fight against al-Qa'ida and its affiliates' efforts online (whether to recruit, propagandize, disseminate tactical knowledge, or issue strategic guidance) is a critical component of the War on Terror, contra critics who claim were are just trying to kill our way to victory.

All of which is preamble to three interesting pieces on how modern communications and social networking platforms have become an important battle ground in the War on Terror. On Tuesday The Washington Post reported on U.S. intelligence operatives' effort to hack into and sabotage al-Qa'ida's online magazine, Inspire. This calls to mind the story I passed along two years ago about Great Britain's MI6's hacking of Inspire and substituting bomb-making recipes with cupcake recipes, although with greater urgency given the online magazine's link to the Boston Marathon bombings. Paul Cruickshank of CNN actually first reported the hack last month, but until now nobody had taken credit for the successful operation.

Also, on ForeignPolicy.com, Jonathan Schanzer reports on the debate over whether or not to shut down various terror groups Twitter feeds. On the one hand, their tweets are an endless source of propaganda/strategic communications that are central to the extremists' recruitment and strategy. On the other hand, intercepting and monitoring these communications tips off the intelligence community as to whom we should be tracking as possible terrorists.

Finally, as a bit of a palate cleanser, Wired's Danger Room's Spencer Ackerman had a fascinating Twitter interview with Omar Hammani, currently the most prominent American jihadi alive, who is on the run both from U.S. authorities (he currently has a $5 million bounty on his head) and his former colleagues in al-Shabaab. The occasionally congenial exchange recalls a lament that a former CIA counterterror analyst (Milton Bearden, I think, although I'm not 100% positive) once expressed, specifically how in the old days you could take a break from hunting your secular PLO terrorist enemy and have a drink and an interesting conversation with them, whereas nowadays all the terrorists in the Middle East were jihadists who didn't drink and would slit your throat if they were ever in the same room with you. Hammami falls somewhere in between, apparently, although he may not live long enough for anybody to find out face-to-face.

Alabama-born jihadist (and current drone target) Omar Hammimi during a press conference in Mogadishu prior to his split from al-Shabaab (Photo: Farah Abdi Warsameh / AP)

Speaking of Africa . . .

1. Last Thursday the State Department announced it was offering more than $10 million in rewards for information leading to the apprehension of the leaders of several al-Qa'ida affiliated networks in Africa, including $7 million for Abubakar Shekau, leader of Nigerian based Boko Haram, and $5 million for Mokhtar Belmokhtar, leader of the "Signed in Blood Battalion" offshoot of al-Qa'ida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

Shekau's Boko Haram has killed more than 2,800 people in its campaign to overthrow the Nigerian government and establish Sharia (its name literally means "Western education is forbidden"), has threatened Western targets in Nigeria (its August 2011 attack against a United Nations facility in Abuja, Nigeria, killed 23 people) and the United States, and has begun aligning itself with AQIM and the Somali-based al-Shabaab. Bekmokhtar, a.k.a. "The Marlboro Man" (a reference to acquiring funding for his splinter group through cigarette smuggling, not because he looks rugged on horseback in magazine ads), was the mastermind behind the raid on British Petroleum's facility in In Amenas, Algeria, that ultimately resulted in the death of 37 hostages, including three Americans.

Although I'm on the record as being a skeptic regarding the utility of bounties in manhunts, if nothing else this is significant as an acknowledgement that these groups pose a threat to U.S. interests, and possibly as a first step toward helping our allies combat these groups before they grow strong enough to directly threaten U.S. targets. Bill Roggio, as always, provides a useful background of Shekau, Belmokhtar, and the Reward for Justice program's other new targets over at The Long War Journal.

(One side note: I appreciated the depiction of the bureaucratic friction that cased Belmokhtar to formally split from AQIM. Apparently, in a memo recovered in a building abandoned by al-Qa'ida fighters in Mali, AQIM described how Belmokhtar "didn't answer his phone when they called, failed to turn in his expense reports, ignored meetings, and refused time and again to carry out" spectacular attacks. Substitute "business development" for "spectacular attacks" and it sounds like any corporate headquarters in America!)

Hostage taking and mass murder aside, I think we can all sympathize with
micromanaging bosses like Mokhtar Belmokhtar's.

2. More disturbingly, the Associated Press also found manuals with Arabic instructions on how to use SA-7 surface-to-air missiles, which are capable of shooting down commercial aircraft. (In Kenya in 2002, for example, suspected Islamic extremists fired two SA-7s at a Boeing 757 carrying 271 Israeli vacationers, fortunately missing their target). In addition to the recovery of the SA-7's battery pack and launch tube by French troops in Mali in March, this suggests that AQIM may have acquired loose MANPADS looted in the wake of Moammar Qaddafi's overthrow in 2011. (Boy, sure glad we learned the post-war lessons from Iraq with regards to securing weapons materiel! In conjunction with the Benghazi consulate attack, suddenly the Obama administration's immaculate intervention model isn't looking so hot anymore).

Noted Georgetown University terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman tells the AP: "If terrorists start training and learn how to use [SA-7s], we'll be in a lot of trouble." This was a concern back when I worked AFRICOM issues in Congress in 2011, and one that I felt was never adequately addressed. A shootdown of a commercial plane could be a game changer in the War on Terror in North Africa, forcing a more direct U.S. involvement against these groups.

French soldiers in March 2013 examining SA-7 battery pack and launch tube abandoned by retreating al-Qa'ida fighters in Mali. This is potentially VERY bad news. Photo by ECPAD, via AP.

Today in Manhunting History -- June 12, 1993: The Attack on Radio Mogadishu

For a month prior to the June 5 ambush of Pakistani peacekeepers, Radio Mogadishu – also known as “Radio Aideed” – had launch a no-holds barred propaganda campaign against UNOSOM II, accusing the UN of “imperialist designs” and “colonization” and calling upon Somalis to defend their sovereignty. After the massacre of 24 Pakistanis, Radio Mogadishu declared the firefights a victory for the Somali people.

At 4AM on June 12, a “steady, ominous buzz” was audible in the sky over Mogadishu. A distant pop was quickly followed by a deep thud – pa-Daa, pa-Daa, pa-Daa – again and again. American AC-130 Spectre gunships fired 10 rounds at Radio Mogadishu and some of the SNA’s weapons cantonments. The attack ended almost as quickly as it began, an orange glow from fires illuminating the city as the buzz of the gunships faded away.

As dawn broke over Mogadishu, Somalis woke to find Radio Aideed destroyed.

Over the next two nights the AC-130s attacked Aideed’s headquarters and the workshop where the SNA’s financier – Osman Ato – converted stolen cars into battle wagons. At Aideed’s residence, American PSYOPS units used mobile speakers similar to those that taunted Noriega to blast Aideed’s house with the sounds of helicopter rotors, tank engines, and machine gunfire in an attempt to intimidate the warlord.

 



An AC-130 Spectre firing at night. Its arsenal includes a 105mm cannon (firing 10 44lb shells/ minute), a 40mm Bofors gun (100 rounds/minute), and twin Vulcan 20mm guns (firing up to 1,000 rounds/minute).



 

Al-Qa'ida's Complaint Department

No, really. According to a notice posted last week in Raqqa, Syria, where al-Qa'ida affiliated militias control parts of the rebel-held city's administration: "Any one who might have a complaint against any element of the Islamic state, whether the Emir or an ordinary soldier, can come and submit their complaint in any headquarters building of the Islamic state. The complaint should be in writing, provide details and give evidence. We promise that we will ensure accountability for anyone committing violations . . ."

Okay. Given that these are the same guys who just two months ago burned all the books in Raqqa's schools because they taught Syrian children "immorality," anybody who takes the jihadists up on their offer is either incredibly brave or incredibly stupid.



Because at al-Nusra, customer service is our top priority (after suicide
bombings, beating "heretics" to death, and  book burning)!





On Jeremy Scahill

Last week The New York Times published an interview with Jeremy Scahill publicizing his new documentary "Dirty Wars," investigating the same topic as his book of the same name on the Obama Administration's targeted killing campaign against al-Qa'ida in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.

For a scathing rebuttal of Scahill's oeuvre in general, see Bruce Bawer's review of the book in The Weekly Standard last month.

Without having read the book yet, nor seen the movie (look, I still have The Avengers sitting on my DVR, so I'm a bit behind cinematically-speaking), my quick take comes closer to Bawer's. While since the Boston Marathon bombing Scahill has been careful to cast his opposition to the "Drone War" in terms of strategy ("We are encouraging a self-fulfilling prophecy. We are making more new enemies than we are killing actual terrorists"), he still repeatedly describes it perjoratively as an assassination campaign.

At best, Scahill is poorly informed about the types of operations that target individuals, or more likely, is just being dishonest in order to skew the debate before it has even started. Targeted killings, whether successful or not, are a form of decapitation strategy in which strikes are directed against an adversary's key leadership in hopes of rendering that country/organization's forces operationally ineffective. Assassination, on the other hand, targets a specific individual during peacetime in hopes that whoever succeeds him will alter the adversary's policy. Whether one is for or against the Drone War, it is grossly inaccurate to conflate it with assassination, since al-Qa'ida is indisputably in a declared state of war with the United States, one that preceded the advent of drone strikes by half a decade.

Although Scahill is an occasionally interesting reporter (i.e. the details about the hunt for Anwar al-Awlaki in this piece from The Nation), he would be a fairer reporter if he actually noted how intractable the jihadists enmity towards the West predating the Drone War genuinely is (i.e. Sayyid Qutb wrote the most vicious jihadist tracts while U.S. foreign policy was tilted against Israel in the 1950s; Osama bin Laden conceived of al-Qa'ida at a time when we were supporting the mujhaddin in Afghanistan) and showed the victims -- American and Muslim -- of the attacks that precipitated the Drone War.

Furthermore, although he is correct that we can't strictly "kill our way to victory," this is a straw man, since even supposed hard-liners such as Donald Rumsfeld famously asked in October 2003 whether we were creating more terrorists than we are killing and, just as in any war, clearly there are some al-Qa'ida leaders and operatives who won't stop trying to attack us unless they are killed. Right, Mr. Scahill?

Unfortunately, as Bawer points out, Scahill never seems to articulate this basic point, instead preferring to excoriating the side that is trying not to kill civilians (whether we are doing a good enough job is open to debate, of course) rather than the side that deliberately targets them.

Gentlemen, Stop Fighting, We're Jihadists!

Reminiscent of the classic line from "Doctor Strangelove," Reuters reports al-Qa'ida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri has told the Iraqi and Syrian branches of the terrorist network to "stop arguing," presumably because whether you are executing children for heresy or indiscriminately murdering thousands of civilians in May, there is no room for discord and strife.

Ayman al-Zawahiri also hates it when his kids fight in the backseat during long car trips, apparently.

Today in Manhunting History -- June 9, 1993: Admiral Howe Requests Delta Force

Although 23 nations contributed troops to UNOSOM II, its decision makers remained primarily American. The Clinton administration, which inherited the Somalia operation in January, insisted that retired Admiral Jonathan Howe be named to head UNOSOM II as the Secretary General's special representative. Howe had served as Deputy National Security Advisor at the end of the Bush administration. He was a slender man who always wore a Columbia-blue UN baseball cap over his graying, close-cropped hair and white short-sleeved shirt that revealed a pale complexion that not even seven months in the Somali sun could color in the slightest. "Polite and articulate," Howe directed UNOSOM II to engage in aggressive action to force the Somali militias to disarm and seemed particularly focused on marginalizing Mohammed Farah Aideed.

After the June 5 massacre of the Pakistanis the head of UNOSOM II, Howe declared Aideed “a menace to public safety” and a “killer.”  President Bill Clinton and his advisors agreed with Howe that the ambush demanded a strong response lest UNOSOM II lose all credibility.

On June 9, Howe requested a team of 50 Delta Force operators to snatch Aideed.  (This was ironic, given that when Howe was a deputy to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral William Crowe, he had vigorously opposed proposals for a similar operation against Manuel Noriega).  UNOSOM II’s Commander, Turkish Lieutenant General Cervik Bir, and its Deputy Commander, U.S. Army Major General Thomas Montgomery, both supported the request, and Howe advised the Clinton administration that the probability of U.S. special operations forces capturing Aideed at 90 percent.  (A CENTCOM intelligence assessment team traveled to Mogadishu in June 1993 and reported the capture of Aideed was “viable and feasible.”  In private, however, team members described the task as “extremely ugly . . . with numerous potential points of failure.”) 

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell resisted Powell’s request, and Secretary of Defense Les Aspin rejected the idea.  Even if Aideed could be found, Aspin thought an already skeptical public would consider Delta’s deployment to be a dangerous escalation.  Consequently, for the time being, Howe would have to try to catch Aideed with the conventional forces already in place. 



Retired Admiral Jonathan Howe, the UN Secretary General's Special Representative for Somalia. Note this picture was taken in April 1993, before Howe began targeting Muhamad Farah Aideed, and is in the southern city of Baidoa rather than Aideed's stronghold in Mogadishu. 





Today in Manhunting History -- June 5, 1993: Welcome to Hell

 

Operation Restore Hope, initiated in December 1992, had been an indisputable success. The protection provided by Unified Task Force (UNITAF), under the command of U.S. Marine Lieutenant General Robert Johnston, to humanitarian relief operations enabled Somalia to survive the worst of the famine that had already killed nearly half a million people. Consequently, on March 26, 1993, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 814, calling for the replacement of UNITAF with a UN peacekeeping force with the expanded mission of “peace enforcement” in which warlords could be compelled to disarm.

 

The most powerful of the Somalia warlords, Mohamed Farah Aideed, recognized that the UN’s plan would weaken his military power and political base, and thus began a vicious, no-holds-barred propaganda campaign on Radio Mogadishu. “Radio Aideed,” as it was known, accused the UN of “imperialist designs” and “colonization” and called upon Somalis to defend their sovereignty. Shootings and rock-throwing confrontations increased around Mogadishu, and UNOSOM II began taking casualties. A CIA assessment around this time deemed Aideed “a threat to peace,” and UNOSOM II’s commander, Turkish Lieutenant General Cervik Bir, decided he had seen enough and decided to respond.

On June 4, UNOSOM II notified Aideed’s interior minister, Abdi Hassan Awale, that various SNA weapons sites were to be inspected the next morning. “This is unacceptable,” Awale replied to the messenger. “This means war.”

The next day, after inspecting the arms cache co-located with Aideed’s radio station, a company-sized Pakistani force was ambushed while returning to their battalion’s camp at Mogadishu’s sports stadium. Another Pakistani unit protecting a food distribution center was slaughtered after one soldier, trying to calm a growing mob, was pulled into the crowd and dismembered. Twenty-four Pakistanis were killed in the attacks, and another 56 were wounded. Ten of the dead were castrated and their eyes gouged out, while others were disemboweled and skinned.

When the Quick Reaction Force from the U.S. 10th Mountain Division advanced to cover the Pakistani retreat, they saw nearby ruins with fresh graffiti declaring: “WELCOME TO HELL.”