What is War?

Let me start this out with saying that my perceptions of terrorism and terrorist behaviors are based on what I can glean from years upon years of news coverage. This mixed with an fixation on the study of human behavior which continues in my never-ending book brings me to prattle on about something I probably really know very little about. I only ask that the point be considered. Contrary evidence is always welcome.

What is the objective of war? Land? Money? Resources? Perhaps, but ultimately war is fought to drive a people from one system of authority to another. If there were no humans associated with the resources, land or money, with whom would one wage war? I would like to present a case that war is primarily used to shift the allegiance of people either by the physical elimination of the old authority, overwhelming force leading to the surrender of that authority, or convincing everyone that their allegiance should be changed. This simple theory has severe implications for the way we address the war on terror. It is not a new concept, but one that should be seriously considered in this new millennium.

The objective of terrorists seems incoherent and hard to grasp. Without the resources to launch a conventional attack, what does one gain by terrorist acts or random bombardments of munitions? With terrorist tactics there are no conventional ground troops to hold that land nor are there means to curtail a military onslaught by conventional means. In fact, the response to conventional attacks is to produce more and more small terrorist attacks, none of which have any total, effective strategic value. When Israel and Hezbollah agreed to a ceasefire, Hezbollah paraded the effort around as a victory for them despite the fact that their land smoldered in ruins. What gives?

Consider the allegiance factor. The most efficient campaign one can wage, if the objective of warfare is to switch a populations’ allegiance is one of persuasion. In a world of uncertainty, individuals or groups who can provide you some reason to believe they can provide certainty more easily achieve this allegiance. Certainty does not come easily, but it works better if you share a common background, an implicit understanding that at least you know something about what’s going on from that person’s perspective. Next you have to convince them that your perspective of the world is the right one. In this age of communication multiple perspectives would be unavoidable, but if you are attempting to undermine a government you wouldn’t publicize it. In fact it would work to your benefit to sew distrust of any published material that wasn’t yours to increase readership of what you handed it out. Once this distrust is established—if the ruling authority had not already provided reason to distrust that media such as publishing obvious lies in a state paper—your next step is to provide an alternate context. To do this all you have to do is to predict major events, which would really be easy for anyone to do, but you supply your own story as to why that happened. This drives home the idea that you know what you’re talking about. And there you have it. But what’s the point? Well, if you begin to build on perceptions of distrust and replace those ideas with your new context, you essentially have a self-perpetuating virus of allegiance switching so long as your environment is consistent.

This doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the attacks, bombings and rockets that are normally associated with terrorism. . .oh, how wrong you are. Conventional states use conventional forces to fight wars of overwhelming force. With the right leaders in power, their response to any sort of physical attack by any enemy, terrorist or state, is to respond with the full weight of their military force, their prime investments. Conventional weapons are impressively loud, obvious, and memorable. They are specifically made this way to deter warfare by making war a perceptual hell. This was the entire basis of the Shock and Awe campaign, which initiated the invasion. There is a story that the M1A1 was redesigned because it was too quite on the battlefield. It didn’t leave the same impression on opposing force that the Panzers had back in WWII. By attacking small but high profile targets or bombarding randomly into civilian areas, terrorist knowingly activate the conventional war machine. It is just the type of predictable response a terrorist organization would need to convince those in their grasp that they were right all along.

Further, the response of a conventional army is to strategize and define objectives to achieve. The problem with these objectives in a terrorist war is that having conventional objectives plays right into the hands of the terrorists. Terrorists would prefer that the conventional military they are fighting use massive armaments and huge explosions, those memorable weapons that conventionally warring nations have taken decades to advance to seer into the minds of conventional soldiers, because those weapons now seer into the minds of the terrorists “victims.” The conventional army and their methods become powerful terrorist tools of propaganda. Terrorist play to stalemate so as to prolong the exposure of the people to the military apparatus that has been recontextualized on their behalf in their war for allegiance. At the same time the conventional war machine chugs more money and lives until the nation which sent it passes over the cost/benefit threshold to say that they are receiving too little gain for their costs. The Russian involvement in Afghanistan is an example of this. The terrorist organization essentially lives off the land, raiding homes of those who could afford to leave, gaining allegiance of those who don't know any better and intimidating everyone else who had too few resources to leave. If the conventional military pulls out, the terrorist organization can then walk right into the state house.

This type of warfare goes beyond Sun Tzu in its unfortunate efficiency. You don’t even have to take your weapons from the enemy, all you have to do is have the enemy use their weapons on you.

This is a problem, because U.S. leadership has thus far either failed to recognize, or failed to understand what this means for regarding use of force. They want so badly to be in a conventional war that they threaten any nation which harbors such individuals. Since these nations are already so weak as to have a public organization of terrorists in their borders, they would certainly fail in attacks by a massive and modern military. . .just the way the terrorists want it. To fix it we need to shift the perceptual balance. First, we need to recognize the public affect of the overwhelming use of force. Terrorists would use this as a confirmation of their worldview. There are steps to being more surgical in the application of military force which would provide less fodder to the terrorists propaganda. Second, publicize good acts and involve citizens directly in those acts. Corrupt the terrorist modes of propaganda, sew distrust in their communication systems. It is not enough to give something to a population that can be turned as a sign of arrogance. To work with a large number of a population to build a school or restore a business is a much better PR move. Third, pull back. The more the terrorist can only attack civilians the more the civilians will turn on the terrorists. Fourth, seal the border. Terrorists demonstrate that their numbers are heavily dependent on the ability to recruit from the nation they infect, but civilian fatigue from prolonged terrorist involvement will eventually turn the population against the terrorists. Terrorist numbers should shrink if no new terrorists are allowed into the nation. Continued growth of terrorist organizations in a state demonstrate that there is a flow of foreigners.