SUMMARY

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Terrorists and rogues have often targeted the United States. They attack American interests and citizens abroad because of the wealth of opportunities, the symbolic value, and the exposure from the world’s most extensive news media. Because of its role in American power projection, the Air Force can be a target, as with the bombing of Khobar Towers, the USAF barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

The Air Force has also been called on to counter the IW arsenal and tactics of terrorists and rogues, as it did in striking targets in Afghanistan and Sudan after the August 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Highly publicized attacks such as the World Trade Center bombing, the use of chemical weapons in the Tokyo subway, and Hamas suicide attacks in Israel have led some to argue that terrorism is an increasing threat.

Others point to “cyberterror,” weapons of mass destruction, or other alarming scenarios. A multifaceted Project AIR FORCE (PAF) study put such issues in strategic perspective, tracing the evolution of international terrorism against U.S. civil and military targets, identifying key trends, and proposing strategies for containment. Although this is not an issue for the Air Force alone, this chapter recommended a number of specific steps that could better prepare the U.S. military and private companies to confront “the new terrorism” and its the information warfare arsenal and tactics, as follows.

Conclusions Drawn from the Information Warfare Arsenal and Tactics of Terrorists and Rogues

• The last decade has seen extraordinary change in the international security environment. Yet much discussion of terrorism remains tied to images from previous epochs; it assumes the same kinds of actors using new and more threatening arsenal weapons.

• The PAF team found that changing technologies and tactics accompany equally important changes in the motives and structure of terrorism itself. These underlying changes are making terrorism more lethal. Although the number of incidents worldwide declined during the 1990s, the number of fatalities rose.

• Several factors account for this new lethality. Some terrorists believe that ever more spectacular and lethal acts are necessary to capture public attention.

• Terrorists have also become more adept at killing, with deadlier weapons made more easily available through alliances with rogue states and private sponsors. During the 1980s, for example, Czechoslovakia reportedly sold over 40,000 tons of Semtex , a plastic explosive, to countries sponsoring international terrorism. Assistance from such governments often enhances the capabilities of terrorist groups.

• With bomb-making and other information now widely available, the number of “amateur” participants have increased. They can be just as deadly as their professional counterparts and, without a central command authority, both harder to anticipate and less concerned about indiscriminate casualties.

• A final trend is perhaps the most striking: the rise of religiously motivated terrorism has brought increased lethality. In the 1960s and 1970s, when modern international terrorism arose, it was motivated almost exclusively by ethnic, nationalist-separatist, or ideological causes. This began to change in the 1980s, and since then a significant share of current terrorist groups has been motivated at least partly by religion. Such groups are an important force behind terrorism’s rising lethality, presumably justified in the terrorists’ minds by the transcendent cause.

• In 1996, for example, the year of the Khobar Towers attack, religiously motivated terror accounted for 10 of the 13 extremely violent and high-profile acts that took place worldwide.

• Counterterrorism today requires diverse responses to an increasingly diverse challenge.

• Mainstream ethnic, separatist, or ideological groups will deviate little from established patterns. They will largely rely on the gun and the bomb, as they have for a century. The sophistication of their weapons will be in their simplicity: clever adaptation of technology and materials that are easy to obtain and difficult to trace.

• State-sponsored terrorism has been the most conservative in terms of tactics; almost without exception these acts have been carried out with a conventional arsenal of weapons. But new entities with systemic, religious, or apocalyptic motivations and greater access to weapons of mass destruction may present a new and deadlier threat.

• High-tech weapons and nuclear materials from the former Soviet Union are increasingly available, and chemical or biological warfare agents are easily manufactured.

• Amateurs, in particular, who may be exploited or manipulated by professional terrorists or covert sponsors, may be willing to use these weapons.

• In addition to becoming more lethal, the terrorist threat is changing in another dimension as well—one driven by computer and communication networks. The most striking development here is not attacks on America’s information infrastructure. It is the way that terrorists are organizing themselves into new, less hierarchical networks and being sponsored by secret, private backers. This change, enabled by the information revolution, makes detecting, preventing, and responding to terrorist activity more difficult than ever before.

• Analysis of terrorist organizations in the Middle East also suggests that the more active and lethal of these make extensive use of information warfare techniques.

• Future terrorism may often feature information disruption rather than physical destruction. PAF found that many terrorist entities are moving from hierarchical toward information-age network designs.

• Terrorists will continue using advanced information technology to support these organizational structures.

• More effort will go into building arrays of transnationally internetted groups than stand-alone organizations. And this is likely to make terrorism harder to fight.

• Hierarchies in general have a difficult time fighting networks. There are examples across the conflict spectrum, including the failings of governments to defeat

• transnational criminal cartels engaged in drug smuggling and narco-terrorism, as in Colombia.

• The persistence of terrorist movements, as in Algeria, in the face of unremitting state opposition, also shows the robustness of the network form, including its ability to spread to bases in Europe.

• Arrests in the United States just before New Year’s Eve 1999 suggest the ability of such networks to operate across regions. The study notes that this change is part of a wider move away from formally organized, state-sponsored groups to privately financed, loose networks of individuals and subgroups that may have strategic guidance but enjoy tactical independence.

• Conventional counterterrorism techniques may not work well against such groups.

• Retaliation directed at state sponsors, for example, may be effective against traditional terrorist groups, but will be likely to fail against an organization with multiple, dispersed leaders, and private sources of funding.

• Implications for the Air Force: How can the United States respond to more lethal, more diverse, and increasingly privatized patterns of terrorism?

An Agenda for Action in Preparing for the information Warfare Arsenal and Tactics of Terrorist and Rogues

The United States needs to formulate a clear, realistic, and realizable national strategy that can evolve with the changing terrorist threat. The PAF team identified four core elements to that strategy: reducing systemic causes, deterring terrorists and their sponsors, reducing the risk of “superterrorism” such as attacks involving weapons of mass destruction, and retaliating where deterrence fails. This strategy leads to key implications for the use of air- and space-based assets:

With its increasing lethality, possible access to weapons of mass destruction, and the shift to flexible and robust network organization, terrorism is a more formidable problem than ever before. Air and space power will be critical elements in defending U.S. interests—including USAF forces—against this evolving threat.

The United States government needs to set an agenda for action that goes beyond the work already done in preparation for defending against the information warfare arsenal and tactics of terrorist and rogues. Action steps should include, but not be limited to the following 14 areas:

1. Default settings for software products sold to consumers should be at the highest level of security.

2. Nations developing information strategies should consider investment, both intellectually and financially, across the gamut of information operations.

3. Air power’s pervasiveness and speed are advantages in the face of transnational and transregional terror. In an era when terrorism may take place across the globe and sponsors may cross national and regional lines, the global sight and reach of Air Force assets should be valuable to national decision makers.

4. Air and space power should not always be the instruments of choice in the U.S. counterterrorism arsenal. They can, however, play an important role in intelligence and covert action.

5. Air and space power should rarely be used independently; instead, they will have a synergistic effect with other counterterrorism instruments such as covert action, diplomacy, economic instruments, and joint military operations. And the same instruments may be used in parallel against terrorist supporters, terrorist infrastructure and networks, and terrorists themselves.

6. Air power in the service of counterterrorism should include, but also go beyond, surveillance and punishment of state sponsors.

7. Deterrence and response should probably evolve in the direction of a more “personalized” approach emphasizing the monitoring and attack of key nodes in terrorist networks and the forcible apprehension of individual terrorist suspects.

8. Demands on air power should be driven as much by the requirement to intercept and extract suspects as by the need to attack training camps or strike supporting regimes.

9. Air and space power should help make terrorism—an increasingly amorphous phenomenon—more transparent.

10. The ability to identify and target terrorist-related activity and help expose terrorism and its sponsors for policy action and international censure should be key contributions of Air Force assets.

11. As terrorism becomes more diffuse and its sponsorship increasingly hazy, finding the “smoking gun” should become more difficult but essential to building a consensus for action.

12. Space-based sensors, surveillance by unmanned air vehicles, and signals intelligence should facilitate the application of air power and other counterterrorist capabilities.

13. Counterterrorism should increasingly focus on urban areas and thus face strong operational constraints. For political reasons, terrorists find key targets in cities. The use of air power for counterterror, therefore, faces the more general problem of operating in urban environments, a situation where the difficult Israeli experience in Beirut and south Lebanon is instructive.

14. The value of air power here should depend on its capacity for discriminate targeting and less-than-lethal technologies.

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