Chaos as strategy - terrorism

Parameters, Summer, 2002 by P.H. Liotta

"A ghost is stalking the corridors of general staffs and defense
departments all over the 'developed' world--the fear of
military impotence, even irrelevance."

-- Martin van Creveld
The Transformatoin of War

In theory, at least, the US national security decisionmaking process is rational. During this process, the decisionmaker establishes the desired goals of policy and develops a strategy for employing often-scarce resources to achieve these goals. This rational calculus seeks to balance both ends and means.

But this rational decisionmaking process is also vulnerable, and the "chaos strategist" will target this vulnerability in challenging America. To plan a strategy of direct engagement with American military forces, as Iraq learned in Desert Storm and the Taliban did in Afghanistan, is lunacy. The chaos strategist, by contrast, must manipulate the scenario to his best advantage while striving to prevent the introduction of American military force.

Adversaries who do not practice a similar process of decisionmaking--balancing resources and constraints, means and ends--will increasingly look for innovative ways to "attack" without attacking directly the brick wall of American military predominance. The chaos strategist thus targets the American national security decisionmaking process and, potentially, the American people, rather than American military force, in order to prevail. Such a strategist seeks to induce decision paralysis.

In a strategy of chaos, the key objective will be to convince American political leaders that no clear solution, end-state, or political objective (other than the cessation of chaos) exists in the strategist's sphere of dominance--and that sphere of dominance may be at home or abroad. Chaos strategy, employed by all warring parties in the former Yugoslavia and by Saddam Hussein in Iraq, serves to initially discourage yet may ultimately provoke American intervention. Yet future adversaries will almost certainly use the leverage of chaos as a strategy for gain.

In the ongoing war on terrorism, however, the practice of chaos strategy by non-state actors, rather than by the leaders of recognized nation-states, may only complicate the security calculus for the United States and its allies. On the one hand, we will practice preemption against those who seek to harm our vital interests and our way of life. Military forces will increasingly be in the business of shooting archers, and not just catching arrows. That is to say that we cannot just wait for chaos provocations to occur before we react.

On the other hand, non-state chaos strategists may soon recognize our overwhelming preemption capability, and strive to shift from being "archers" to disappear as quickly as possible. The most effective non-state adversaries that we will face will likely display some of the following characteristics: the facility to operate effectively as a lateral (and noncentralized) network, the ability to learn, the capacity to anticipate, and the capability to "self-organize" or reconstitute after they have been struck.

Non-state actors, in particular (whether or not they are sponsored by "nation-states" or by easily targetable organizations), can accomplish vanishing acts with far greater ease than adversarial leaders of problematic states. The implications are important as we assess new challenges in the war on terrorism. Moreover, we should seriously question if we are asking the right questions about military transformation in the post-11 September security environment. After all, we are not the only ones asking "What went wrong?"

In the case of the September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, a feasible chaos strategy was meant to induce not only fear but also a sense of extreme vulnerability in the American homeland. As such, the United States entered a new security era in which attacks by non-state actors on the homeland proved possible and US citizens, their way of life, and the specific liberties that they had been accustomed to were now vulnerable and at risk.

Admittedly, the attacks on 11 September represented an intelligence and interagency failure on a colossal scale; fortunately, the same intelligence network was able to track and prove the case against Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda with relative speed. Yet the vulnerability and transparency of the American system led military planners and former CIA officers to proclaim that, regarding the attacks themselves, "We couldn't do this.... I have never seen an operation go that smoothly." (1)

In the future, chaos strategists may well seek gain through attacks that cause the excessive deaths of innocents and provoke further cultural/religious/ethnic fault lines both among contending adversaries and potential allies. Despite all claims to the contrary, it is not yet clear that the United States is capable of shifting from a style of warfare that might be described as the American way of war--essentially, the annihilation of an enemy--to a style of warfare that requires far more intense "closework." In simple terms, are we planning for the wars we want to fight rather than for the wars we will have to fight?