Does one become a "state" if they possess, as an individual, a 100 Megaton device and the will and skill to employ it.

This often comes up. My short answer is "No, and welcome to the crux of what is frustrating the crap out of states these days."

The problem is that in today's globalized environment many non-state actors can act in very state-like ways; yet they are outside the ability of our state-based systems to either effectively deter or punish them. THIS is sanctuary. This is what we must deny AQ and others like them.

I was in an exercise that involved an individual employing a WMD device and then running to an allied nation and and taking sanctuary in a region of that state where it was largely self-governing and the populace was sympathetic to the motivations of this actor. Higher HQ demanded that we put a COA on the table to essentially retaliate in kind on the piece of dirt that we were pretty sure this guy was hiding on.

So, our only "reasonable" response was to conduct a massive act of war against an allied state and its populace because some individual had attacked us with WMD and was now hiding there?

Ok, this was a "third world" ally. But what if he was hiding in London? Still pull the trigger? What if he was hiding in Washington DC or New York? Still pull the trigger? What if hiding in some state we don't get along with?

The fact is, that if you wouldn't do it in your own backyard, you shouldn't do it in anyone else's either. That is the slippery slope that we jumped on with the GWOT and have been rocketing down ever since.

No, you must address such acts as criminal. To do otherwise is to create more harm in the response than was created in the initial attack. It is to play right into the hands of your attacker who intended quite likely for you to over react in that way.

So how to then "deter" such an attack? One has to back up and look at the big picture and longer windows of time than on does with traditional state on state deterrence. One has to balance HOW one acts so as to be less apt to provoke such individuals to act. Granted there will always be the one-off's of the McVeigh ilk. Not much one can do to deter them. But we can do effective deterrence on groups that draw their support from broader segments of the populace in these various communities around the world.

This doesn't mean go around walking on eggshells and not make anyone mad, it means being fair in our firmness. Coming out of the Cold War the US stopped having to be "fair" because no one could do anything about it. We became more and more bully-like in our responses and engagements. Look at how we went from bombing no one, to conducting the Libya raid in the late 80s under Reagan and how serious that single event was, to dropping bombs at virtual random under Clinton, to invading countries at random under Bush, etc. We're out of control. Time to reel it back in. Everyone knows how tough we are, we don't have to go around stuffing countries in lockers to prove it. Every act to preclude or preempt some bad actor out there had 2nd and 3rd order effects to motivate and provoke previously relatively harmless non-state actors to want to do us harm. We can no longer just ignore those guys, they can and will hurt us.

We need to constrain ourselves. We need to look at a much more complex mix of states and actors within states and balance our actions more effectively. A lot of the big guys in the pentagon are still doing simple math. A +B =C. That just doesn't cut it anymore.