A New Kind of War

As noxious as Washington talk shows generally are, this weekend's were significant. Watching all of the Talking Head shows out of D.C., I struggled to decipher the particular meaning, language and codes of that city's inhabitants. George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Dick Cheney and others were on the tube all weekend, and they seemed to be sending the same signals and saying something important. They were talking about a "new kind of war," one that re-emphasized human analysis and intelligence gathering, but also offered a central role for many involved in security technology, from electronic ID to surveillance. They were not talking about Desert Storm, but something radically different. As usual, the media offered much rhetoric, few details. And there are substantial concerns about privacy and civil liberties. People are wondering how this new kind of war might work, what it might look like. Some of you might have some ideas.

Americans think of D-Day or the invasion of Iraq when they think of war -- massed fleets, armies and planes, tanks and fortifications. But the National Security types and military brass were clearly talking about something else completely.

This sort of offensive, confusing and strange-sounding to non-tech laypeople and those outside the military, will clearly rely heavily on security technology -- surveillance, wire-taps, electronic ID's from cards to voice and fingerprint scanning, biological warfare and defense, e-mail encryption and interception, satellite photographs, the digital tracing of money, the use of pin-point troops and weaponry to go after small numbers of terrorists located in inaccessible cells in distant countries. Such a conflict raises all sorts of policy questions, from our grasp of different cultures to the nature of religious fundamentalism to changes in traditional ideas about civil liberties, to use of the Net as a communications medium for terrorism, to technologies that might make airplanes and buildings safer. People have suggested more sophisticated X-ray devices to spot weapons and bombs, stronger pilot cabins, buildings less massive and vulnerable than the World Trade Center towers.

Most officials were quick to say the war would like unlike any other, and that drafting vast numbers of people wouldn't be necessary. This war would be fluid, varied, combining weaponry with diplomacy and economic pressure.

The intelligence experts who came out of the cold last week were nearly unanimous in agreeing that old-fashioned spies -- sometimes unsavory humans -- were crucial to get close to terrorist "cells" but also that new forms of communications -- e-mail, cell, the transmission of encrypted files -- required new laws and better technologies to monitor them, since they were terrorist tools. Also needed, they said, are computer programs to better track the movement of money.

Is such a war possible? Technologically feasible? Can encrypted terrorist communications really be followed online? Is it possible to trace money so precisely by digital means? To what degree can civil liberties or privacy be protected in this context? Is there technology that can spot a knife in a briefcase or hidden in a human body? How close can satellite surveillance take us to small terrorist hideouts in urban or rural areas? Is the idea of the mobile, tech-equipped soldier feasible? What weapons would he or she carry?

Over the last few years, I've gotten e-mail from academics, defense researchers, satellite trackers, government cryptographers about various issues relating to technology. It would be interesting to hear from some of you who know more about this than most people. In fact, some of you might be directly involving in working on these things.

America's defense and policy planners are calling for a new kind of war and a new kind of warfare. Few people have any idea what it might look like or how it might work.

Comments

Why is a civilian spouting off about war?

[WillSeattle]

Seriously, Jon, what credentials do you have for war? There are many people on /. who have military experience, and you're not one of them.

Look, it's going to be nasty, brutish, bloody, not fun. War sucks. Killing, noise, fire, confusion, being tired constantly, on edge, it's not a game.

There are many ways we can do it. The smartest would be to get some local intel of terrain and people (many of whom have fled, maybe some assistance from Afghanis who fled the Taliban to Iran would work, since the Pakistanis support and arm the Taliban, and half their intel would be designed to trap us). Land on mountain tops and passes, set up defensive perimeters with mines and mortars, anti-tank and ATA, put spread out artillery in gun pits, and blast any vehicle or concentration that moves. Because only the Taliban moves in 2/3 of Afghanistan, the local population that they control (who don't support them) don't have mobility.

But we'll probably do something dumb instead.

Some of us have combat experience in mountains, Jon. And you're not one of them. Your techie toys won't work in mountains - a defender has a 20:1 or 10:1 advantage if he knows the terrain and the opponent is vaguely unfamiliar with it. A few people can hold off battalions, when placed right, we'll be lucky to move 2 miles in a day.

And cruise missiles are economically ineffective - JATO-assisted dumb bombs have a 98 percent kill rate, while a cruise missile there has at best an 80 percent kill rate, and you just need a dug-in position and nothing short of a nuke will affect you (and even those have to get the angle right).

This isn't a war game. This is a war. We will lose people, we need sound strategy and tactics, not people with ideas about fire-and-forget missiles that get confused in mountain terrain, or using MBTs in mountains (which are easy to kill with mines and vertical attacks with anti-tank).

War is a bad metaphor

[HenryFlower]

As a number of people have commented, war is a bad metaphor for what we need to do here. This is not, however, simply a police action, as some people have suggested.

(See this commentary in the New Yorker and this one in Salon for calls to treat this as a police action.)

I suggest that the best analogy for what we need to do is treat this like the Italian struggle against the Mafia. The crucial step is a cultural change, from the situation where the CD party treated the Mafia as a necessary evil that was just part of the political landscape, to where all of Italian society turned against the Mafia, and magistrates and judges were willing to risk their lives to rid Italy of Mafia control. The Mafia still exists, no doubt, but it no longer has the same insidious grip on the political system.

Here, the crucial step is getting the Arab and Muslim countries to stop treating their radical Islamists as necessary evils who, since they can mobilize the poor, and can kill dissenters, must be tolerated and accepted. Many countries, such as Iran and Syria, have used these groups to fight proxy wars for political control over the Middle East. The best thing that can come out of this tragedy is an alignment of Arab and Muslim contries against their radical elements, and a change in the culture there to stop accepting bloody attacks against civilians as acceptable political tactics.

That's why bombing Kabul, for example, is likely to be counter-productive. As much as we want the Taliban to be out of Afganistan and replaced by some more acceptible government, the likelihood that we will succeed is low, and the likelihood that we will simply piss off the very countries we need to align against these guys is high.

I suspect that what Rumsfeld et al. are talking about by "new kind of war" is making their point on asymetric warfare: the notion that we have gotten so good at fighting conventional wars that no one will send armies and navies against us, but will instead fight with more "terrorist-like" actions. My guess is that internal in the Pentagon this is being used as an "I told you so/wake up call".

history

[Frymaster]

those who's leaders forget history are condemned to repeat it:

"we must be willing to continue our bombing until we have destoryed every work of man in North Vietnam if this is what it takes to win the war"
-Curtis LeMay
General US Air Force
Long Beach CA,
April 1, 1967


"We have dropped twelve tonnes of bombs for every square mile of North and South Vietnam. Whole provinces have been substantially destroyed."
-Robert Kennedy
Senator from New York
Washington DC,
Feb 8, 1968


"You've got to forget about this civilian stuff. Whenever you drop bombs you're going to hit civilians. It's foolish to pretend you're not."
-Barry Goldwater
Senator from Arizona
New York City
January 23, 1967


"It has become increasingly apparent that the US bombing of North and South Vietnam has been one of the most wasteful and expensive hoaxes ever to be put over on the American people."
David M. Shoup
Commadant US Marines Corps
in Atlantic magazine
April 1969

Re:World Without Borders

[junkgrep]

As most political science people have been warning for years, increased globalization must inherently lead to anger and frustration, even if every country in the world were a democracy (which they are not, making it even worse). The reason is that while the actions of your national government have at least the stink of legitimacy for a dictatorship, and lots of legitimacy for a democracy: the actions of on foriegn nation upon another have absolutely none. So, as the foriegn policy of one nation increasingly effects the lives of people in other countries, we're bound to see major unrest and anger. It's simply what occurs whenever there is major disconnect between people who make a policy and those affected by it. The innovation of democracy is that it mostly solves this problem. But it can only do so domestically. The fact that a nation is "democratic" is totally meaningless from the perspective of those who are not citizens.

The Middle East is a prime example: many of our foriegn polices, which seem almost trivial wave of our hands to us, have had tremendous effects on the lives of people there. Some are good, some are bad. Naturally, those who feel they are bad are going to feel absolutely violated, and these feelings of illegitimacy often give rise to extreme fringes that are willing to use violence- because they lack any other avenue (remember: in a democrcacy, this avenue is becoming part of the political and legal system: even if your party loses, it still has a chance to live and fight another day).

So, contrary to people's claims that Bin Laden hates democracy: that we are a democracy is actually probably totally irrelevant to people like him. This concept, in fact, is almost totally opposite to the real problem: that he feels that there is no legitimacy (which democracy would be one avenue of providing) to what the US does in the Middle East. The problem is not that we are a democracy, but rather that there is NO democracy at work to mediate between our ME policies and the people affected by them.

Remember: this is not a moral estimation of anything or anyone: simply a policy analysis of the dangers that inevitably arise when situations of political illegitimacy exist.

A side note: The one morbid effect our democracy might have on Bin Laden would be to lead him to conclude that all Americans are ultimately responsible for what our government does, since it's power ultimately rests in us. That this rationalization might be how he or his cells justified attacking civilians is an almost chilling thought. There is nothing per se wrong with this reasoning: we are responsible for our government. But to think that such a previously glorious and wonderful fact could be employed in such a sick, blowback fashion, is deeply deeply saddening.