Quote Originally Posted by marct View Post
Selil and Jedburgh's points about critical nodes notwithstanding, you can attack either the critical node or a critical circuit (nodes and connections) in a loosely coupled network. Even more importantly, you can induce "noise" (think of rumour in a social network) or feedback (think truly viscious rumours) through a network circuit that can damage or destroy it. In a tightly coupled network, you can do the same thing by accelerating a circuit vector. For example, you can take an orthodox belief in a social circuit and then put it on steroids - "everyone must believe X or they will be killed", etc. A biological analogy would be poisoning someone with overdoses of vitamin B.
At this point, I think I should clearly state that all my maundering on about networks is relative only to clan threat networks of human beings. Ranging from HOIS agent nets, to terrorist organizations across a broad spectrum of types, as well as the underground support structures for overt insurgencies.

Destruction is the goal we strive for with such networks, and damn difficult to reach, unless you catch'em early and eliminate the movement at the fetal stage. The methods that Marc refers to are difficult to plan and implement effectively against an organization with any roots at all. On the rare occasions when such tactics have been effective (i.e. Kenya, the Philippines) it has been in a relatively narrow sense, and only resulted in the type of temp disruption that I mentioned in an earlier post. When that temp disruption is exploited in a structured manner to dig deeper into the threat structure, and the opportunity is seized for aggressive follow-up, then it can lead to network destruction, but not as a stand-alone approach.

Again, I'm referring only to the types of organizations I mentioned above, not to emerging, immature entities that can be easily (in a comparative sense) destroyed by the methods Marc stated. On the other, repressive governments have often used such methods with great success against dissident networks. The study of dissident networks in Eastern Europe during the Cold War period offers a lot of valuable lessons on clan comms and security measures evolved by the various groups to mitigate against this sort of threat to their underground existence.