U.S. Drone Attack Strategy Against Al-Qaeda May Be Wrong

An anonymous reader writes "A new study (abstract) in the journal Informational Security evaluates the U.S. military's strategy for killing off al-Qaeda's leadership using remote drone strikes. The study argues that the strategy is ineffective, calling into question both the military's rationale for doing so and the allocation of defense funds to run it. Essentially, there are two different types of terrorist organizations: those held together by a small number of charismatic leaders, and those who have developed their own bureaucracy, almost like a business. 'Companies don't fall apart when they lose their CEO or CFO; other people are being trained to do that job and there are institutional mechanisms preserving the knowledge the CEO brought to the table. Also, rules create clear lines of succession, so destabilizing struggles over who gets to take over the group's leadership become less likely.'

Intelligence on al-Qaeda indicates it's more of a bureaucratic group — unsurprising, since terrorist organizations that have been around for a while tend to evolve that way. Since the drone attacks started, there has been no significant correlation between successful strikes and a reduction in al-Qaeda attacks. 'The case for the drone program, at its heart, is that killing significant numbers of underlings AND a small number of high-level leaders is severely weakening the group's operating ability. Jordan's study suggests that al-Qaeda just isn't the kind of group that can be beaten that way.'"

Comments

Correlation vs correlation

[SplatMan_DK]

OK, so "there has been no significant correlation between successful strikes and a reduction in al-Qaeda attacks".

Am I the only one thinking things might have been much worse if no terrorist leaders had been taken out at all?

Re:Correlation vs correlation

[Simon Brooke]

You're not thinking at all, you're just emoting.

If you were thinking you would realise that drone strikes on a civilian population - on women, on children, on funerals, on weddings - recruit a thousand terrorists for every one they kill. Of course the CIA and the military promote this policy. More terrorists means more money for the CIA and the military, terrorism and counter-terrorism are inherently symbiotic. But foreign policy should not be dictated by the needs of inter-agency pissing matches in Washington DC.

Re:Correlation vs correlation

[fredrated]

Probably not, but that doesn't make it correct. The drone murder of innocent people, which has been widespread and widely reported, is the best recruiting strategy for terrorists money can buy. I fear that much more than not replacing replacable leaders.

Re:Correlation vs correlation

[AthanasiusKircher]

The bigger issue that no one wants to admit is that we are dealing lunatics and engaging them, is a mistake. During World War II, both Germany and Japan eventually admitted defeat and gave up. But that's because you were dealing with people who were somewhat rational.

Yep. 'Cause gathering up millions of people and mass murdering them is "somewhat rational" behavior. (Germany -- see "Concentration Camps") Or ordering thousands of soldiers to go on suicide missions, sometimes without any hint of success, and without any good evidence that it actually was a more successful strategy... very rational. (Japan -- see "Kamikaze") Or... well, isn't that enough for a start?

The people we are dealing with today are literally insane.

Yeah, I know. They are willing to blow themselves up in suicide attacks, and they don't even care about whether they take women or children with them. Oh wait... that sounds just like some of the things Germany and Japan did.

No amount of military action will ever convince them to quit.

No amount of military action convinced Hitler to quit -- when surrounded, he simply committed suicide, along with convincing a lot of others to do the same. As for Japan, well, the militarists who were basically running the show through much of the war would have never given in -- in fact, they staged a coup against the Emperor's wishes to surrender, taking over the Imperial Palace. Luckily, the surrender broadcast recording had been hidden, and once that was played on the radio, it was over.

There was a "whole lotta crazy" going on during WWII as well -- and it was only through superior military forces and intervention at the highest level of leaders (the general staff in Germany after the suicide of Hitler, the emperor himself in Japan, who had previously been less assertive in reining in the militarists) that they were "convinced to quit."

Re:Correlation vs correlation

[JohnnyComeLately]

Very good articulated and supported point which is valid, however, the targeting is no longer the guys with an idea. Meaning, 5 years ago you'd have targeted the emplacers (the guy with a shovel, or in your analogy, an idea). With time, the lesson was learned the effect was small and it is relatively ineffective. Now, you go up the chain and after those who enable others to become more effective. Let me give an example, let's say AQ has three targets in the US: A general officer, a private and an NCO (Non-Commissioned Officer).

Taking out the General is symbolic but has very little impact on the effectivness of the US Army. If you take out a private, there are 10-20 others identically trained and with similar levels of proficiency. However, the NCO leads several squads. The NCO is a trainer, mentor, coach, knowledge manager and adult babysitter.

Taking the NCO out has a real effect on the battlefield as General Officer orders may not get correctly implemented, new troops may not come up to speed (read: battle effective) as fast, etc.

So, the best target for having an effect on battle is the NCO. The US and NATO are not after the General or the Privates... yes if there's a target of opportunity, a real threat, and the RoE/LoAC allows, a shot is taken, but the active targeting is at the NCO level. I wish I could be more specific but I won't. Just as most of what you read in mainstream or see in the movies about computers, technology, etc is wrong, so is the supposed, "wanton carnage from UAVs bombing everyone." I spent 3 years watching hundreds of strikes and you couldn't even apply most of what I read here to the exceptions, much less the "norm." People read a few articles and suddenly are experts on tactical military operations 1/2 way around the world (ignoring the few who incorrectly refer to it as "strategic bombing").

Re:Correlation vs correlation

[Savage-Rabbit]

OK, so "there has been no significant correlation between successful strikes and a reduction in al-Qaeda attacks".

Am I the only one thinking things might have been much worse if no terrorist leaders had been taken out at all?

The problem is that US has gone overboard with these 'decapitation strikes' (read: assassinations) and they are causing blowback. A further problem is that Al-Qaeda is highly resistant to this kind of strategy because it is just as much an idea as it is an organization and you cannot kill an idea with a drone strike or an M4 carbine. Because it is primarily an idea or a philosophy, Al-Quaeda operates more like a franchising company (or maybe like an MLM outfit) than a traditional guerrilla organization. In addition to a religious philosophy, Al-Quaeda provides information on bomb making, how to train, how to operate weapons and how to obtain them, how to communicate securely and how to evade security forces etc... People motivated by Al-Quaeda's message often form cells first and then contact the organization for support, not the other way around. Al-Quaeda will bankroll promising groups and operations but their control over these groups can be pretty limited. I've heard accounts of motivated 'Mujahideen' showing up in the Pakistani tribal country, seeking out al-Quaeda and 'pitching' operations to them like a Hollywood director would 'pitch' a movie script or a TV show to a studio. Decapitating al-Quaeda cells with drone strikes or special forces ops is like a never ending game of whack-a-mole because there is an endless supply of martyrs that are often recruited from the human 'collateral damage' of drone strikes. Even if the director of the CIA could snap with his fingers and every al-Quaeda fighter on earth would drop dead today the idea of al-Quaeda would live on and new cells would form and the 'war on terror' would continue tomorrow because, as I said before, you can't kill an idea.

Wait, so dropping bombs on people isn't working?

[terevos]

So let me get this straight.... Dropping bombs on people doesn't make them stop attacking you?

Whenever I get into an argument, I just punch the other guy in the face. That usually stops the argument and everyone walks away with a happy smile.

Am I the only one

[kyldere]

Am I the only one who finds this article comparing terrorist orginizations to (US) corporations darkly humorous? ... Maybe I just haven't had enough coffee this morning.

Maybe just get out of the middle east altogether?

[walterbyrd]

No troops, no money, no sanctions, no weapons sales, nothing. Not to any mid-east country, including Israel.

Just buy their oil, and that's it. What other business do we have there? Let the chips fall where they may.

Why is the US putting itself in the middle of their ancient, perpetual, non-sensicle, squabbles?

I hate to say it, but: let the crazies kill each other, if that's what they want to do. They have been doing it forever, and US presence only gives them somebody else to blame.

  All those lives, all of those trillions of dollars, for what? We are no safer from terrorism. In fact, we may be more at risk.

Help one tribe, and you piss off another. Never fails. The "good guys" one day, are despotic leaders, and US haters the next. I think the US supported both Sadam, and Osama, at one point.

As the computer said in "War Games" : "The only way to win is to not play."

Re:If you have the opportunity

[Anonymous Coward]

Using laughable intelligence from foreign powers and bad actors, using signature kills, and making errors that murder innocent civilians effectively turns a non-supportive population into a supportive population IS the problem. Your final solution will just create more opportunities for people to become supporters of the terrorists (and not the USian ones that are raining down death on everything remotely from thousands of miles away), so you're really suggesting genocide. Good luck with that.

start shipping truck loads of money there

[alen]

get the governments to support western investment into the business structure to put people to work. people who have a life tend to not become terrorists.

look at the US. military recruitment falls with a good economy

Re:If you have the opportunity

[peragrin]

Nuke the site from orbit. It is the only way to be sure.

Re:If you have the opportunity

[Anonymous Coward]

Nuke the site from orbit. It is the only way to be sure.

Well, that would be rather harsh towards Maryland and Virginia, wouldn't it?

Re:Whats the alternative?

[Simulant]

IMHO,

Ultimately this is a culture war and will only be won over the long term. For starters we could push back against Saudi Arabia instead of coddling them. I don't see how anyone can expect to win a war against Islamic fundamentalist terror when the spiritual center of Islam is controlled by fundamentalists with unlimited funds from oil sales. We also need to promote a more equitable distribution of wealth, world wide. Poverty breeds violence, ignorance, and fundamentalists of many stripes.

We could quit behaving like hypocrites, ignoring blatant and obscene human rights abuses by our Islamic dictatorship "allies" because it's profitable in the short term.

We could quit pissing our pants at the thought of terrorism, accept that it may occasionally happen (as it always has), and carry on instead of over reacting. Islamic fundamentalist terrorism has never represented the existential threat to western society that some would have us believe. It may be a thorn in our side for quite some time but the pain and damage it inflicts is entirely absorbable.

We should quit using this pathetic war on terror as an excuse to destroy ourselves.

Anti-Drone arguments are so frequently flawed.

[Kelbear]

The problem with the VAST majority of criticisms against drone warfare is this: /They don't cite alternatives./

If an author has a problem with intervention policy. THAT is what the author should be targeting! Drones are incidental to the intervention policy and are off-point. If the goal is to persuade the audience against intervention, then the subject of intervention needs to be directly addressed.

If an author has a problem with drone warfare itself, then present the alternatives. If "boots on the ground" is a more effective way to ensure surgical precision and minimal collateral damage, advocate for that and present the supporting arguments, and preemptively address the counter-argument of the potential for taking casualties along the way as a necessary cost of preserving civilian life and reducing the amount of backlash that creates new terrorists. If the author believes that counterintelligence and local partnerships is more effective, then THAT should also be presented, citing past successes in reducing insurgency and improvements to civilian quality of life.

But if the author has a beef with drone warfare, and presents no alternatives, then they leave the massive hole in their argument of "If not drones, then what?". If the perception of drones is that they kill enemies and prevent us from losing soldiers in the process, and the author wants to do away with drones, then the audience is left to wonder: "Is this author really suggesting that we should lose our soldiers for no good reason, when we could have used drones instead?" Address that question head on!

Re:If you have the opportunity

[bluefoxlucid]

Imagine you're at a wedding.

You have a Pakistani friend, nice girl. Moved here to get away from all this bullshit.

She invited two of her cousins. They have friends as well, who were invited. One of those friends is a suspected--but not proven--terrorist. He's on a list of people who may or may not be associated with a terrorist cell which may or may not exist and may or may not be associated with Al Qaeda.

A missile comes in. You're at the edge of the crowd, fortunately; you get scraped up a little, but you're fine. You find yourself surrounded by the wounded, by pieces of bodies. The mangled upper half of your cute Pakistani friend lies beside you, silent, bloody, almost unrecognizable. There's nothing left of the maybe-could-be-might-not-be-terrorist, of course: we got him.

This is the story of many. For many more, there is no story: they were too close.

Re:If you have the opportunity

[mfh]

If anything happened to Musk as of right now, Tesla would be divided and absorbed into the old model. He is a visionary and visionaries have to be protected like you protect the King in a game of chess. Look at what's happening to Apple.

Venture Capitalism for Terror

[Nidi62]

They are just now realizing this? I read a book written all the way back in 2004 that described al-Qaeda as not a terrorist group, but more like a venture capitalist firm. All of these groups-Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, al-Shabaab, Boko Haram, all the local al-Qaeda groups- aren't all actually part of al-Qaeda. Instead, they come to al-Qeada with a plan and essentially ask them for money. If al-Qaeda agrees, they give them the money and let them claim affiliation. Cut off the head of al-Qaeda, the successor still has access to all the funds. Cut off the head of one of the other groups, and that group might fall apart (or just get a new leader), but all of the other groups remain unaffected. To take down terrorists groups you can't go for the head, you have to go for the base (see what I did there?). Go after the funding sources, whether that be blood diamonds, sheiks dripping in oil money, drug production, etc. Go after the recruitment base (predominately young, educated, ideologically motivated but politically or economically disaffected men) and the structure will collapse from the ground up. Drone strikes do nothing for the former, and do the opposite for the latter.

Remember what bin Laden did in the war against the Russians: he wasn't a fighter, he ran a support structure in Pakistan that funneled fighters, weapons, and money to the Mujaheddin. Why would you think he would have started an organization that did anything different?

Re:Maybe just get out of the middle east altogethe

[walterbyrd]

You are making the classic mistake of fighting the last war.

These are not the 1930s or 1940s. We are not fighting countries but loosely connected groups.

There is no way to win in the middle-east. Any involvement just makes us the bad guy.

Re:If you have the opportunity

[Anonymous Coward]

Replace the word "terrorist" with "criminal" and see how absurd your argument is in the context of *BOMBING CIVILIANS*. No, the correct thing to do is to treat terrorists like the criminals they are, try them, and arrest them. The point isn't to end terrorism by capturing all the terrorists. It's to have a system of justice in place so (1) less people have a desire to become terrorists and (2) because it's just to have a justice system and unjust to just bomb civilians because one of the people may be a criminal.

Nah. We should start drone striking board rooms with CEOs in America. In America, the mere fear of being arrested for the white collar crimes you commit is so horrible and catastrophic to the organization--and all the other organizations which apparently also have CEOs guilty of white collar crimes--we must let the CEOs free and at most demand a percentage of their ill gotten gains from the corporation (with no admission of guilt). Organized crime on the other side of the planet gets a lot of collateral damage with bombs where they "try" not to kill civilians. Imagine if during Prohibition the fed had used car bombs against the mob. And, hell, the mob at times was more respectable than what we have today in corporate America.

Re:If you have the opportunity

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with this is in 10-20 years they too will have flying remote bombers and when they bomb our military and hit our civilians, they can legitimately claim, "Well that's what the US gets for hiding its military leaders within civilian populations." Don't doubt that what comes around will go around regarding this technology. And that is a scary thought.

Re:If you have the opportunity

[gweihir]

Well, the one thing the US has never understood is that basically all opposition it faces is because nobody likes a primitive bully. Rater obviously, pissing people off more is not the solution to make them less pissed-off. Killing a lot of innocents in a Goliath-like and completely unapologetic fashion makes the US the of of the least likable and least honorable nations on the planet, and that is saying quite something.

Re:If you have the opportunity

[Anonymous Coward]

The US has only performed strategic bombing twice, and it was back in WWII over Japan. Nuclear bombs are strategic. A GBU dropped from a Predator, Reaper, of manned fighter is tactical bombing.

This is completely wrong.
Strategic bombing was employed extensively in WWII.
When you bomb factories, worker populations, or rail and transportation networks, that is strategic bombing.
When you bomb the enemy units directly engaged with your units, that is tactical bombing.

Strategic bombing was the bombing of choice for particularly the British Air command in WW2 and used extensively by the United States as well. We also did tactic bombing of course, but it was quite an argument at the time of which was preferred.

I'm sure additional examples from other conflicts can be provided as well, but to suggest that strategic bombing strictly implies nuclear weapons is false.

Re:If you have the opportunity

[whistlingtony]

His scenario happens all the time. It's not rare at all. And it's a small village! You hang out with who you hang out with. If they ARE militants, they have guns and men. Are you going to stand up to them? Hell no.

You need to read more. Vice has some excellent videos from the ground over there. Check 'em out on Youtube.