Belmont Club:
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The near civil war in Gaza; the fighting within the House of Saud; the conflict between terrorist factions in Iraq may not be isolated phenomenon but the consequences of the Israeli and American campaign against terror. From Iran to Lebanon the terror masters are no longer secure in their own kingdoms. In an article in the Naval War College Professor Edward Smith reminds us that Clausewitz defined victory as imposing a state of chaos on the enemy: the definition of a rout. Chaos was itself a condition that the enemy had sought to impose upon us by applying disruptive terrorism to set routines of civilization. Smith points to
a dangerously misleading assumption underlying much thinking today about the “revolution of military affairs”: that the United States will always be technologically superior and thus fight faster and better. In reality, tempo of operations is not solely a function of technology; it is also a function of the centralization of command. One can choose to trade centralized control for speed and scope of operations. This may forgo some of the ability to mass effects on a specific objective, but if the effect sought derives from the pace and scope of the attacks rather than from the amount of destruction, or from a cumulative impact rather than specific actions, then this trade-off may be acceptable. In other words, one could confront a technologically superior enemy by creating a new asymmetric zone in which small, decentralized units could operate successfully but in which an opponent using large formations under centralized control could not respond coherently.
America was going to be left defeated and confused. Those decentralized units, like Al Qaeda's airplane hijackers, could tie down a disproportionately large conventional force as the hapless United States was engaged everywhere and effective nowhere. Yet America, in its own way, was redressing the balance by organizational adaptation and the application of new technology. What if it could act so swiftly, so multifariously and so locally that the enemy would be literally overwhelmed by an attack on all fronts?
Instead of thrusting a rapier into the OODA cycle at precisely the critical time, we could unleash something akin to a swarm of bees. Even if no single unit has a decisive impact, the overall effect might be to leave the victim swinging helplessly at attackers coming from all directions, unable to mount any coherent defense save retreat. In essence, we would provide so many stimuli that adversaries could no longer act coherently but must constantly recycle ... The result would be lockout.
A cyclical reboot. The Blue Screen. By broadly attacking terrorism at many levels yet targeting leadership figures individually, the United States and Israel may have created the chaotic effect of an attacking "swarm" upon the foe. Psychologically speaking, this moment may have arrived when Israel targeted Hamas chief Yassin with a Hellfire missile although the effort existed long before. The perceptive Steven den Beste suggested that Israel's real goal in striking Yassin was to create a series of permanent power vacuums in the enemy ranks: in other words, to unleash chaos. The decentralized and cellular nature of terrorism would then begin to recoil upon the enemy state sponsor. Like a carnival dinosaur, the terrorist murder machine had to be carefully caged to prevent it from turning on its masters. In fact, the whole point of terror was to direct the whole mass of frustrations in repressive and dysfunctional societies at the external scapegoats: the Jihad is an excuse for avoiding the task of making Islamic society work. A successful American and Israeli effort to blunt the enemy attack and destroy its command linkages would turn the beast on its keepers. The key to successfully surfing this wave of chaos is to sit right on the boundary of control and watch the enemy get eaten away.
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