Economic Warfare Strategy

[Bill Moore]

Rob,

I like to start by providing a link to an important research story "From the Horse's Mouth: Unraveling Al Qaida's Target Selection Calculus"

http://cns.miis.edu/pubs/week/070417.htm

Such an analysis of what al-Qa`ida tells the world—and, most importantly, what it instructs its recruits and would-be cell members—indicates that al-Qa`ida's target selection calculus is motivated by a far more ambitious, sophisticated and sinister motive: to destroy the economy of the United States and other Western powers by striking economic targets in the West and in the Muslim world. The network asserts that doing so curtails the American presence and influence in the Middle East and will end Western military and diplomatic support to regimes in the region. This ambition serves the final objective of severing American and Muslim alliances and bringing about the removal of all Western influence from the Middle East, as well as the overthrow of current Muslim regimes.

The calculus of primarily attacking western targets of significant economic value is bluntly discussed in al-Qa`ida's political publications which aim to "educate" the Muslim world about al-Qa`ida's objectives and methods. These publications elaborate in sinister detail the network's intention to empower individual cell members with the training and skills required to sustain al-Qa`ida's global Jihad.

This well researched article clarifies beyond dispute (in my opinion) that Al Qaeda has an overarching strategy based on economic warfare that we as a nation have yet to grasp, and even worse we act like an Al Qaeda patsy by supporting his strategy with our predictable, large, expensive, and ineffective responses to Al Qaeda attacks. Looking at it from an economic view point, it is as though Al Qaeda cuts us once, then we cut ourselves a thousand times reacting (or potentially over reacting). The article explains their effects based strategy clearly, and paraphrasing one example, the explain that if we attack one airport the enemy is obligated to spend millions/billions of dollars protecting all airports, not just in the west, but worldwide. This makes me wonder if the failed plot to blow up 11 planes in the UK was truly a failure, since the reaction was the same as had the plot been successful. Once the terrorist place a bomb in one mall, what will our response be? Federal laws mandating added security measures in every mall? Who will pay for that?

Our challenge is to find ways to effectively counter this strategy, but the equation is hard to defeat. As Robb stated in his book there are significant economic asymmetries. The one example he gave that I recall is an attack on an Iraqi pipeline that probably cost around $2,000.00 to execute, but resulting in a loss of $250 million in revenue. When they export these tactics to the West the economic asymmetry will be significantly worse. The challenge is to develop "cost effective" defenses, but I'm not sure that is even possible at this time.

[Rob Thornton]

Bill,
Great article & way to start the discussion with a great one. AQ’s 8 point plan is well articulated and borrows some from the psychology of people's war - in that it qualifies victory as being apparent/fulfilled, its just a matter of those taking up the Jihad to follow the instructions. It is a powerful psychological tool that fits with its decentralized nature - as long as you do these things and believe, we'll win"

I think it also brings up why contention for the Middle East and "traditional" Muslim lands are important. If you start removing some of the plan’s milestone type points, the prophetical tone of the plan is more open to debate, much as Lee mused about whose side God was really on. We must cast doubt as to AQ’s motivation and the pre-destination of the plan’s success.

I agree about the anti-terrorism measures being costly, but I'm not sure about its overall impact on our economy. I can't give you a good reason, other then to say that some of the monies spent have had positive side effects in other ways, such as disaster preparedness, public safety, the criminal justice system, Information security efforts, and maybe a few others - how much of that has come from an interest generated to protect ourselves against AQ and how much is not transferable – I don’t know. It is certainly costing an incredible sum in Iraq in terms of resources and focus, but the effort there would also seem to counter AQ's points 2,3 & 4 of their strategy - I think the trick here though is to find a better way to do this (both in Iraq and around the world)- maybe through proxies and allies.

What is really interesting to me is how much AQ identifies America through its economy. I think that really deserves some attention. I just wonder if Osama really believes it, or it is a kind of propaganda aimed at enhancing the infidel image? England was often misjudged by linking its will to its economy. We always hear that we are culturally ignorant about the East, but I wonder how many bad assumptions AQ made about us based on their belief system? Can we exploit that to our advantage?

Reading their plan also made me wonder how much of it was targeted at me the "infidel" reader? How much was meant to scare businessmen, consumers, from participating in the globalize world and from scaring Muslims who might have interests outside the Muslim world? It is a very good piece of strategic IO from that perspective since they are able to target so many audiences.

I think the way forward is to expand and strengthen economic ties across the board. If AQ has so much to offer lets put it on the table. I think the attraction of the caliphate is that it promises reconciliation for the disenfranchised and the truly ideological (ultra-conservative/radical). It promises a reward for believing in the Caliphate - you don't have to go to school, compete and succeed, you only have to believe and wage jihad - your problems real or imagined are not your fault, they are the fault of the infidels led by the Zionist and the United States - any and all things that come from the infidels are bad because they are not Godly.

We must help demystify the AQ credo and work to expose it as perversion of Islam, while at the same time investing into the same people that AQ is trying to recruit from. I don't think we can, or must we reach them all, what we need to do is create the conditions for stability that offer Hope, self-respect, opportunity, and something to lose by following Jihad vs. gaining Paradise. We must replace an ideology of hatred with something else. This is a two part equation – discredit the message from AQ, and offer something better. A person who does not have self-worth is easy picking for AQ. If you detract from the appeal of the message, then you take away the consumer base (put in capitalist terms). If you take away the consumer base then you reduce the weight of the movement and move AQ away from the tipping point they need for a truly mass movement of individual global guerillas working in concert to achieve systems failure.

We (all those interested in stability) must show that the way to Paradise is not through the AQ interpretation of the Qur’an, but through more benevolent forms of self sacrifice, and also through providing more moderate examples of faith. That tolerance, pluralism, and secularism are not juxtaposed to faith, but are simply conditions in which faith can be demonstrated. That it is OK to inter-act with other cultures and religions and discuss the different paths to God, and that of your faith’s own merits, it will spread. Here I think Robb’s point about the evolution of the nation-state is going to be different then we know it is right. Things are going to change one way or the other, but that does not mean it has to morph into a caliphate, nor does it mean the absence of government. I think government is a necessary evil in that we need some structure an organization to have a society.

I in no way mean to imply this is easy, or that I've articulated it well, just that I think the problem set requires something more then a strategy of shield and hammer because that is perhaps too costly to sustain for a decades long struggle, and that it is one of technological one -up manship. I'd prefer to see us adopt a balanced strategy that made at much use of free-markets and humanitarianism (both traits of the West) as sorts of asymmetric advantages as much as our military capabilities.

Hope I did not get to windy – but the subject had my two brain cells rubbing together real hard.

Well - I'm going to charge on to CH 4

[Jedburgh]

This well researched article clarifies beyond dispute (in my opinion) that Al Qaeda has an overarching strategy based on economic warfare that we as a nation have yet to grasp, and even worse we act like an Al Qaeda patsy by supporting his strategy with our predictable, large, expensive, and ineffective responses to Al Qaeda attacks. Looking at it from an economic view point, it is as though Al Qaeda cuts us once, then we cut ourselves a thousand times reacting (or potentially over reacting). The article explains their effects based strategy clearly, and paraphrasing one example, the explain that if we attack one airport the enemy is obligated to spend millions/billions of dollars protecting all airports, not just in the west, but worldwide. This makes me wonder if the failed plot to blow up 11 planes in the UK was truly a failure, since the reaction was the same as had the plot been successful. Once the terrorist place a bomb in one mall, what will our response be? Federal laws mandating added security measures in every mall? Who will pay for that?

I agree that we as a nation have failed to grasp the strategy; we certainly haven’t come to grips with it at the national decision-making level. However, there are not a few within the community that have been well aware of this for quite a long time – and have experienced just a bit of frustration at the predictable knee-jerk manner in which we react to both incidents and threats.

And at another level, there is a huge crowd of parasites here in the U.S. that knowingly exploits this type of knee-jerk reaction with fast-food consultant advice and ad hoc training opportunities that, amazingly, are bought up by people who you think would know better. This crowd of “experts” purposefully perpetuates this predictable manner of reaction because they profit from it.

Then there’s the massive lot of semi-trained and inexperienced analysts throughout the community who immediately react with a flood of so-called analysis and IBs as to their perception of the impact of the “new tactic”. They’re like a syndicated news article – they all read the same, just under different agencies’ letterheads.

This is truly an example of the crime theory of “displacement” in reverse. As illustrated by the quotes in the article, the bad guys understand our method of reaction – but what is unstated in the piece is that fact that, with finite resources, we almost always strip/reduce some potential target (whether of physical security, or redirecting intel assets) in order to focus on the “new” threat. This raises the question as to whether the incident/threat is purely targeted at forcing us to expend more of our treasure in the process of bleeding our economy – or whether it is a feint/probe, to further their knowledge of our reactions and how we shift resources to deal with threats.

Given the rich target environment and their failure to take advantage of certain very lucrative targets both domestically and overseas, I hesitate to give them much credit toward the latter interpretation. However, there are truly smart guys among the SOBs, and we can’t bet the farm on continued failure to exploit weaknesses.

Our challenge is to find ways to effectively counter this strategy, but the equation is hard to defeat. As Robb stated in his book there are significant economic asymmetries. The one example he gave that I recall is an attack on an Iraqi pipeline that probably cost around $2,000.00 to execute, but resulting in a loss of $250 million in revenue. When they export these tactics to the West the economic asymmetry will be significantly worse. The challenge is to develop "cost effective" defenses, but I'm not sure that is even possible at this time.

The counter is not a fortress reaction – this is not only economically unfeasible, but it is simply impossible to secure everything. You can’t drink the ocean. The “cost effective defense” is aggressively attacking the networks. We are doing this, to an extent, but not as much as we should (in my personal, biased opinion). I am referring to the combined intelligence, law enforcement and special operations effort to disrupt and destroy Al Qa’ida command and operational cells.

Being an old HUMINT’er, I naturally tend to lean toward intelligence driven ops. But I believe in this matter I am not really being parochial when I say this is truly the only effective way to approach mitigating this threat. Given that the effort needs to be truly collaborative, we are still (almost criminally so, in my opinion) hamstrung by lack of effective intelligence sharing across the spectrum and real communications interoperability doesn’t exist - efforts to fix these issues remain fragmented.

In any case, there is no such thing as an outright “defeat” of an enemy of this nature – but we can sufficiently mitigate the threat by disrupting and destroying elements of the network until his moment has passed.

[Stu-6]

This reminded me of an interview I once heard with a guy had been a F-105 pilot in Vietnam he add up the cost of a few sorties of fighters vs the cost of the few small boats or trucks that they would destroy. Concluding that part of our problem there was that our bottom line was so out of line with our enemy.

Still I don’t know for a relatively poor state or not-state group to be attack the US’s economy seems like it might be hitting us at our strongest point. . .then again we the national debt is what $8 trillion?

[CPT Holzbach]

Still I don’t know for a relatively poor state or not-state group to be attack the US’s economy seems like it might be hitting us at our strongest point. . .then again we the national debt is what $8 trillion?

Thats a good way of looking at it. I think it's less our economy that's a strong point though, and more our capitalistic tradition. America is nothing if not ruthlessly capitalistic, sometimes unethically so, as Jedburgh pointed out with all the bogus "analysis for hire". So how can we leverage that tradition and our deep pool of business talent to both harden our economy and go after the enemy?

[Granite_State]

This reminded me of an interview I once heard with a guy had been a F-105 pilot in Vietnam he add up the cost of a few sorties of fighters vs the cost of the few small boats or trucks that they would destroy. Concluding that part of our problem there was that our bottom line was so out of line with our enemy.

Yup. Robb's big on talking about ROI (return on investment), isn't he? The figure that always gets me, don't remember where I got it but it was somewhere reputable, was that 9/11 cost Al Qaeda about $500,000 and did, at conservative estimates, $500 billion in damage to the U.S. economy.

[Ski]

Heh, I used some of Robb's work on this subject for a recent Master's paper.

The conservative estimate was $80B, with $500B being the highest figure.

I think he's on to something - the costs of waging high tech war, whether conventional or not, is becoming unsustainable even for us. If AQ or other terror groups continue to attack us with cost/benefit ratios similar to 9/11, then we are in trouble.

The good news is that these kinds of attacks are exceedingly rare, and there are very few that I can imagine that would have the same impact as the 9/11attacks.

Yup. Robb's big on talking about ROI (return on investment), isn't he? The figure that always gets me, don't remember where I got it but it was somewhere reputable, was that 9/11 cost Al Qaeda about $500,000 and did, at conservative estimates, $500 billion in damage to the U.S. economy.