Strategy (43 page)

The presumption that there might be a decisive cyberwar attack assumed that the offense would dominate and that the effects would be far-reaching, enduring, and uncontainable. The threat gained credibility from the frequency with which companies and even high-profile networks, including the Pentagon, were attacked by hackers. Protecting and managing privileged information against sophisticated foes who probed persistently for the weakest links in networks became a high priority. But effective attacks required considerable intelligence on the precise configuration of the enemy's digital systems as well as points of entry into their networks. The possible anonymity and surprise of the attack might have its attractions, but any proposal to mount one would raise obvious questions about the likelihood of success against an alert opponent, the real damage that might be done, the speed of recovery, and the possibility of retaliation (not necessarily in kind). An opponent that had been really hurt might well strike back physically rather than digitally. Thomas Rid warned that the issue was becoming dominated by hyperbole. The bulk of “cyber” attacks were nonviolent in their intent and effect, and in general were less violent than measures they might replace. They were the latest versions of the classic activities of sabotage, espionage,
and subversion. “Cyber-war,” he concluded, was a “wasted metaphor,” failing to address the real issues raised by the new technologies.
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Arquilla and Ronfeldt described “netwar” as “an emerging mode of conflict (and crime) at societal levels, short of traditional military warfare, in which the protagonists used network forms of organization and related doctrines, strategies, and technologies attuned to the information age.” In contrast to the large, hierarchical stand-alone organizations that conducted police and military operations, and which extremists often mimicked, the protagonists of netwar were “likely to consist of dispersed organizations, small groups, and individuals who communicate, coordinate, and conduct their campaigns in an internetted manner, often without a central command.”
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Terrorists, insurgents, or even nonviolent radical groups would not need to rely on frontal assaults and hierarchical command chains but could “swarm,” advancing in small groups from many different directions using different methods in a network held together by cellphones and the web. In practice, the more visible manifestations took the form of “hacktivism,” a way of making political or cultural points rather than threatening the economy or social cohesion. Even if more determined adversaries were prepared to mount substantial attacks, the result would likely be “mass disruption” rather than “mass destruction,” with inconvenience and disorientation more evident than terror and collapse.
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The use of social networking, such as Facebook and Twitter, during the early days of the Arab Spring of 2011 illustrated how swarming could leave governments uncertain about how to cope with a rapidly developing public opinion. Such tactics followed well-established principles from before the information age. Radical groups, especially during their early stages, were often based on loose networks of individuals. To avoid attracting the attention of the authorities, they found it safer to operate as semi-independent cells, communicating with each other and their shared leadership as little as possible. To be sure, the Internet and the other forms of digitized communication made it easier to keep in touch, but the number of security breaches attributed to calls or electronic messages being traced still left them hesitant to talk too openly or too specifically. Moreover, radical networks required an underlying social cohesion or an attachment to a clear campaign objective to bring diverse individuals together. In order to prosper they needed to move beyond the cellular form. This required a leadership able to mobilize and then direct sufficient force to strike significant blows. It was difficult to move beyond being a nuisance and harassing the enemy to seizing control without an authoritative point of decision. As the Arab revolts of 2011–2013 demonstrated, regimes facing serious opposition did not reply with social
networking of their own but with repression and force, and in the end, it was the possibility of armed rebellion and the readiness of the military to defend the regime that were crucial.

The initial focus was on the role of information flows in sustaining standard military operations, facilitating faster decision-making and ensuring more precise physical effects. The irregular warfare in the 2000s soon brought into focus the more traditional forms of information warfare, and the Americans appeared to be losing ground to apparently primitive opponents regarding how these conflicts, their stakes, and their conduct were perceived. Their opponents lacked physical strength but seemed to know how to turn impressionable minds. Superiority in the physical environment was of little value unless it could be translated into an advantage in the information environment. As this was the “chosen battlespace” of its foes, the United States was now required to learn to conceptualize its victories in terms of shaping perceptions over time rather than in terms of decisive engagements that annihilated the enemy.
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The issue was not so much the flow of data but the way that people thought.

The counterinsurgency struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan led to an almost postmodernist embrace of pre-rational and embedded patterns of thought that allowed individuals, and broad social groups, to be caught up in a particular view of the world. Major General Robert Scales sought to explain the contrast between the failure of Islamic armies when fighting conventional battles Western style and their far greater success in unconventional war. He developed the concept of “culture-centric warfare.”
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In facing an enemy that “uses guile, subterfuge, and terror mixed with patience and a willingness to die,” he argued, too much effort had been spent attempting to gain “a few additional meters of precision, knots of speed, or bits of bandwidth” and too little to create a “parallel transformation based on cognition and cultural awareness.” Winning wars required “creating alliances, leveraging non-military advantages, reading intentions, building trust, converting opinions, and managing perceptions—all tasks that demand an exceptional ability to understand people, their culture, and their motivation.” This would be a “dispersed enemy” communicating “by word of mouth and back-alley messengers” and fighting with simple weapons that did “not require networks or sophisticated technological integration to be effective.”

One reflection of the growing recognition of cultural factors was that the Pentagon employed an anthropologist, Montgomery McFate, to consider the interplay between military operations and Iraqi society. Among the mistakes she identified were failures to appreciate the role of tribal loyalties as the established civilian structure of power collapsed, the importance of coffee
shop rumors compared with official communications, and the meaning of such small things as hand gestures.
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The growing recognition of the importance of the ability to influence another's view of the world was evident in the frequent references to “hearts and minds” in warnings about what was lost politically by indiscriminate and harsh military operations. The phrase came to be used whenever there was a need to persuade people through good works and sensitivity that security forces were really on their side, as part of a broader strategy of cutting militants off from their potential sources of support, including recruits, intelligence, sustenance, weapons and ammunition, and sanctuaries. The counterargument went back to Machiavelli—that it was better to be respected than loved, that opponents could be intimidated and demoralized by physical strength but encouraged in their opposition by concessions.

The problem was more an over-facile approach to the hearts-and-minds concept. In other contexts, “heart” and “mind” were pitted against each other—strong emotions versus cool calculations, appeals to values and symbols versus appeals to the intellect. This is reflected in an early use by the British General Sir Henry Clinton when facing a similar problem with the upstart Americans in 1776. The British, Clinton argued, needed to “gain the hearts and subdue the minds of America.”
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In practice, in discussions of countering both insurgency and terrorism, those opposed to brute force tended to stress gaining hearts more than subduing minds, as if provisions of goods and services could win the support of a desperate population.

There were three difficulties. First, as noted, local political loyalties would depend on local power structures and any measures would have to be judged in terms of their effects on these structures. Second, while there were undoubted benefits to repairing roads and building schools, or securing power and sanitation, these efforts wouuld not get very far if security was so poor that foreign troops and local people were unable to interact closely and develop mutual trust. They were the sort of policies that might help prevent situations deteriorating but were less likely to help retrieve it once lost. A more minds-oriented approach might establish that trust by addressing questions about who was likely to win the continuing political and military conflict and the long-term agendas of the various parties. The insurgents could sow doubts about who among the local population could be trusted, about what was real and what was fake, about who was truly on one's side and who was pretending. As the insurgents and counterinsurgents played mind games to gain local support, they could be as anxious to create impressions of strength as of kindness, to demonstrate a likely victory as well as to hand out largesse. In terms of the cognitive dimensions of strategy, this was as
important as any feel-good effect from good works. Both would depend on the actual experiences of the local population and local leaders, and the mental constructs through which it was interpreted. The third problem was that this strategy required greater subtlety than just an awareness that different people had different cultures. It was hard to argue against an improved sensitivity about how others viewed the world and the need to avoid ethnocentrism.
Culture
was itself a slippery term, often being used as something that envelops individuals and shapes their actions without them being able to do much about it. The term could include almost anything that could not be explained by reference to hard-nosed matters of interest. Attempts to define another's strategic culture often then came up with something remarkably coherent, without contradiction and almost impervious to change. At least among academics, this approach was largely giving way to a practice of referring to some received ideas that help interpret information and navigate events but which were subject to regular modification and development. We shall return to some of these ideas in the last section of this book when we develop the idea of “scripts.”
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The importance of an exaggerated view of culture was that it could lead to the assumption that alien attitudes and uncooperative behavior reflected the persistence of an ancient way of life, untouched by modern influences, asserting itself whatever the conditions.

Against the suggestion that individuals were socialized into hard cultures sharing assumptions, norms, patterns of behavior, and forms of mutual understanding that could be implicit, unspoken, or taken for granted—that were all but impenetrable to an outsider—was the possibility that in a dynamic situation where communities were being subjected to new influences and challenges, cultures were likely to develop and adjust, and become less effective in binding people together. Thus, observed Porter, in the literature on reconstructed Islamists, warrior peoples, and insurgencies fed by cultural difference, it was as if the people encountered did “not act but are acted upon by impersonal historical forces, taking orders from the culture; or that modes of warfare are singular and fixed by ancestral habit.” People were able to learn and accommodate within their cultures new types of weapons and forms of conflict. References to the durability of hatreds and the evocation of cultural symbols could encourage stereotypes of the primordial and the exotic as harmful as those that assumed that all people were seeking to remake themselves in a Western image. Explaining problematic behavior as a consequence of people being set in their ways was not only condescending but also let off the hook those in the intervening forces, whose actions might have prompted a hostile reaction, and underestimated the extent to which opponents in a prolonged conflict would interact and pick up ideas,
weapons, and tactics from each other.
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The need to have convincing stories impressed itself on officers trying to work out how they coped with a vicious enemy while trying to stay on the right side of the people they were supposed to be helping. Kilcullen observed the insurgents' “pernicious influence” drew on a “single narrative”—simple, unified, easily expressed—that could organize experience and provide a framework for understanding events. He understood that it was best to be able to “tap into an existing narrative that excludes the insurgents,” stories that people naturally appreciate. Otherwise it was necessary to develop an alternative narrative.
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It was not so easy for a complex multinational force to forge a narrative that could satisfy a variety of audiences. A British officer saw the value of one that not only helped explain actions but also bound together “one's team, across levels of authority and function; the diplomatic head of mission, the army company commander, the aid specialist, the politician working from a domestic capital, for instance.” He recognized that this might lead to variations in the story, but so long as there was an underlying consistency this need not be a problem. But liberal democracies found it hard to generate consistent stories, or to appreciate the needs of the local front line as against those of the distant capital.
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