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Combating Terrorism Center Proposes New Way To Attack al-Qa'ida
West Point's Combating Terrorism Center recently published a paper, Harmony and Disharmony: Exploiting al-Qa'ida's Organizational Vulnerabilities, which--drawing heavily on organization theory and a mass of captured al-Qa'ida internal documents--offers a new approach to fighting terrorism. The paper starts descriptively, attempting to 'predict where we should expect terrorist groups to face their greatest challenges in conducting operations', and ends prescriptively, '[providing] several tools for identifying and exacerbating existing fissures as well as locating new insertion points for counterterrorism operations.' One prominent member of the martial intelligentsia, William Lind, describes it as 'one of the most thoughtful and potentially most useful papers anyone has written on the so-called 'War on Terrorism.''
Omninerds... what do you think? Do the CTC's proposals make sense? Are they militarily acceptable, either generally speaking or in today's political climate? And what role should organizations like the CTC (or individuals like Mr. Lind) play in our national debate on foreign policy? Talk amongst yourselves.
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what is it??
so what is the new approach? I don\'t feel like reading the whole paper.
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Splinter Cell
Ok, I'm wading further through it, and it's worth the read if you care about the topic. From what I've read so far, it discusses the information warfare efforts by al Qaeda, and the history and structure of the organization. Some of it is pretty close to what Will has discussed earlier in Al Qaeda's Strategic Evolution and several other articles he wrote.
So far with what I've read, I was pretty close with my last post in that al Qaeda has splintered into basically a franchise, with little direction or funding coming down from the senior leadership of al Qaeda. They provide the guidance and inspiration, and disseminates some tactical and technical stuff, but ceased functioning as a hierarchy when we invaded Afghanistan. Now you have a bunch of clowns like Zarquawi running around running an independant organization that funds, recruits, and operates by itself. What the paper recommends is exploiting the schisms in the organization. All organizations have communications issues and disagreements between the senior leadership and middle management. Al Qaeda's situation has particular strengths and weaknesses based on the communications challenges it has now, and the differences in opinion among all the "middle managers" about how the show should be run. Interesting reading!
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OPSEC? by PowerPointSamurai :: NR7 :: Show
I saw this a week or so ago, but haven't finished reading the whole thing yet. I was a bit startled they had all of this out in the open like this for anyone to read. Meanwhile, the latest edition of The NCO Journal has a thinly veiled threat-article against bloggers, who in my opinion are invaluable for public relations (far better than any official public relations dorks) and information warfare. I guess I can only hope they have carefully thought through the OPSEC vs. information warfare angle on this stuff before they released it. I mean, obviously there is a certain amount of message to the general public, or even a message to al Qaeda itself with this, otherwise they would've released it on AKO or restricted it to .mil IP addresses, or put it on SIPRnet, etc.
On what I have read of it, it looks like good advice and the kind of stuff the top institutions of the Army should be thinking about.