“Networks and Netwars: The
Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy” John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt
The book “Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime and Militancy”, edited by John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt from the RAND corporation [Arquilla 2001] formulates a new concept, netwar, to characterize a certain mode of conflict. They present the features that characterize a netwar and analyze which factors determine their success. The provide several examples of, on one hand, netwars that are violence prone, and, on the other hand, netwars that aim to bring about positive social change.
In this paper an analysis of some of the authors most important statements in this book will be carried out and some further issues that come out of these ideas are discussed.
About the editors
The RAND corporation is a think tank that started off after World War II, funded by the United States Air Force, but became independent shortly thereafter. Most of its research revolves around national security issues. The research that brought about this book was done at the National Defense Research Institute (NDRI) within RAND, which is federally funded by the Department of Defense. John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt have, throughout the years, written or edited several books on emerging conflict concepts, such as cyberwar [Arquilla 1993], noopolitik (an information age approach to strategy and diplomacy) [Arquilla 1999], swarming [Arquilla 2000] and netwars. Their publications are of particular interest to U.S. policymakers and strategists.
Netwars
Arquilla and Ronfeldt propose in this book a new concept, netwar, which can be used to characterize a type of conflict that has become more frequent in recent years and, in their opinion, will become even more common due to the wide availability of information technology. A netwar is a
“mode of conflict (and crime) at societal levels, short of traditional military warfare, in which the protagonists use the network forms of organization and related doctrines, strategies and technologies attuned to the information age” (p. 6).
There is an important distinction between netwar and cyberwar. In a netwar, information technology is used as a support mechanism for battles that are carried out in the “real world”, while in a cyberwar, the battle is carried out in cyberspace and its purpose is to hinder or damage the adversary’s information systems. Furthermore, even though a salient characteristic of a netwar actor, or netwarrior, is that it is supported by information technology, its defining characteristic is its networked structural organization.
Netwars can be both destructive and violence-prone or promoters of civil change and beneficial for society. Several examples of both are described in the book. On violence-prone netwars, examples such as Middle Eastern terrorist networks, criminal networks, some street gangs and hooligans are described and analyzed. On the side of social netwars, the Free Burma campaign, the Zapatista movement in Mexico and the Battle of Seattle are studied. Other examples that are briefly described or just cited include the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), the Chechen resistance and several violent nationalist groups.
Netwar battles are carried out in swarms. A swarm takes place when “dispersed units of a network of small (and perhaps some large) forces converge on a target from multiple directions” (p. 12). Several examples of swarming are described throughout the book, including coordinated terrorist attacks, mass e-mailing and faxing to press congressmen on some issue, massive human right protests or the daily acts of the Direct Action Network in the Battle of Seattle to prevent the World Trade Organization meeting from taking place.
In the last chapter of the book, having described and analyzed several examples of netwars through the intermediate chapters, the authors come up with a list of five characteristics at different levels that they find make a netwarrior successful: organizational, the structure should be a network; narrative, there is a common “story” that all the members of the network believe in; doctrinal, there are common collaborative strategies and methods across the network; technological, there is use of information technology to support the network and its actions; and social, there are personal ties that assure loyalty and trust (p. 324).
The perspective of the authors
There is an interesting pattern across all the examples studied in the book. In the case of the violence-prone netwarriors, the authors consider them successful whenever they are capable of committing the terrorist acts, crimes or disruption that they are set to accomplish. In the examples of social netwarriors, they are considered successful as long as they can get their message transmitted through the media, create pressure on governments or disrupt events. However, they are not evaluating whether the policy changes that these latter groups pressure for happens or not. For example, the Battle of Seattle is depicted as a successful netwar since it was capable of disrupting the World Trade Organization meeting. However, it is not evaluated how much effect, if any, this had on world trade policies. Therefore, the successes that these social netwars have are evaluated in terms of their fulfillment of disruption or destruction, not of how much favorable change for their cause they create.
It would seem therefore that there is a bias on how things are looked upon by the authors. Their perspective is more aligned with the counternetwarrior point of view. For the counternetwarrior, the netwarrior’s success lies in it being able to manifest itself on attacks and being able to survive. From the netwarrior point of view, instead, this would be short-term success: the long-term success would be to effectively change, for example, world trade policies.
Why use a new abstraction
It could be argued that netwars are nothing new. Why wouldn’t some criminal organizations of the past that had a network organization fit into the category of netwarriors? In fact, they do, and the authors acknowledge this. There are even a few pre-information age netwar examples mentioned in the book such as the network structure that supported Mohamed Fara Aidid in Somalia and allowed him to stay undercover or the first Chechen War (p. 11). The point that Arquilla and Ronfeldt make is not that netwars haven’t existed in the past; rather, their point is that they have become more common due to the fact that the information age makes it easier for such network structures to form and survive, since information technology allows for easier and faster transmission of information across the network.
It is implicitly understood that by classifying these conflicts under the common higher-level abstraction of netwar, further insights can be gained than if the conflicts were studied on a case-by-case basis. However, throughout the book, it is rather clear that there is no significant advantage to have this concept when analyzing each individual netwar. Most, if not all, of the conclusions that are drawn for each of the examples could have been reached without the existence of the concept. For example, the same “It takes networks to fight networks” (p. 15) conclusion is reached in the analysis of terrorist networks (p. 54), transnational criminal networks (p. 95) and street gangs (p.124) without, apparently, a higher-level netwar abstraction.
An interesting exercise that the authors do by the end of the book is finding what is common among successful netwarriors, the five points described previously. However, these five points are not used to analyze any of the netwar examples of the book. It would be interesting to see if these five elements are indeed an indicator of how successful a netwarrior will be. For now, since it is not done, and there is no purpose in doing it since they were drawn from the examples, it has not been yet proved (or disproved) that it is a useful tool.
The purpose of coining the term netwar would therefore be not so much for now to provide the benefits of a higher-level abstraction, but rather to highlight a type of conflict that has the potential to become more and more present. For national defense purposes, having a concept that groups together these conflicts is useful, since finding the weaknesses of a particular netwarrior may help in the future to identify them as well on another. Identifying the successful ways to challenge these netwarriors can also help in defining how to adapt the government and its enforcement agencies to challenge them.
Hierarchies for construction,
netwars for destruction?
Throughout the book, the authors analyze the advantages of these networked organizations. The most notorious benefits of the networked configuration are good defensive structures, in which the edge usually protects the core; links across heterogeneous groups that facilitate cooperation and synergy; links across national or jurisdictional boundaries that allow evading the actions of law enforcement agencies at one side or the other; and, finally, robustness and resiliency since there is no single point of failure.
As mentioned above, the advantages that the authors find are always in terms of survival and carrying out disruption or destruction. None of the pros and cons is evaluated in terms of constructive civilian change. Not even the social netwars are evaluated in these terms, since their effect on policy change is not studied at all.
This brings up an interesting question: are networked organizations, when compared to hierarchies, better poised for destruction rather than constructive change? It would seem so. In hierarchies there is a clear chain of command in which responsibilities are allocated. Also, a hierarchy’s manifestation can be permanent, making prolonged efforts possible. Instead, in network structures individual responsibilities are hard to pin down, if at all possible, and its manifestation is the swarm, which comes and goes.
When a hierarchical organization attacks, disrupts or destroy, the members responsible for these acts can usually be found by following the chain of command and specific persons can be held accountable for their acts. In the case of wrongdoing networked organizations, which usually attack in swarms and whose members then camouflage among the rest of the population, enforcing the law is a much harder task.
Constructive civilian change usually requires the continued societal presence of the group that is advocating or stimulating it. In this book we find an example briefly mentioned at the beginning of a network structure that has done this, the ICBL. Even though the structure of the ICBL is a network, their constant presence in society seems to stimulate the appearance of leaders and persons with more notoriety, such as Princess Diana of Whales and the recipient of the Nobel Prize award, Jody Williams. The appearance of these leaders makes it at some point loose its basic network structure to morph into a more hierarchical one. This example would suggest that networks that are constantly present in society start to change their structure. It is easy to imagine, for example, another successful network of NGOs that works, for example, in human rights. When the time comes to lobby, or to present their thoughts and demands to the media, leaders will start appearing out of the homogeneity of the members. This goes against a pure network structure. The question would be then if networks can survive long-term societal presence.
It is also interesting to take a look also at the way in which hierarchies and networks enforce change. While hierarchies can have short or prolonged attacks, a netwarrior as described in this book, attacks in swarms. Imagine an “attack” in which the organization wants to bring about civilian change. In the case of a hierarchy, for example, take the U.N. guarding the economic and social reconstruction of a country. This needs a prolonged presence of military enforcement making sure basic services and political participation comes back to normal. In the case of a networked structure, however, it is hard to envision how persistent “good” swarms can happen and bring about social reconstruction or any kind; it can, as in the case of the Zapatista movement, prevent things form happening, but it is hard to imagine how it can be an agent of continued constructive change.
Counternetwar
The authors discuss different strategies that governments can take towards netwarriors, depending on whether they are in line or contrary to their purposes and on whether the government wants to take a soft-power approach (influence through ideas or discourse) or a hard-power approach (material opposition or material support). If they are in line, a soft-power attitude would be for example to publicly acclaim their actions, while a hard-power attitude would be to provide economic support. If they are not in line, a soft-power attitude would be to ignore them, while a hard-power attitude would be, for example, to attempt to arrest their members or cut their financial sources.
As mentioned before, the point of view of the authors seems to be aligned with the defense, or counternetwar, perspective. Being this so, and considering the case of taking a hard-power opposition attitude, how are today’s governments, institutions and law enforcement organizations, which have obvious hierarchical features, supposed to challenge netwarriors?
The authors state several times that it takes networks to fight networks. This assertion comes mostly from the fact that there are obvious strategic advantages for a network structure and that hierarchies, by their own structure, do not have these advantages. The way in which the authors believe that hierarchies can make up for these strategic deficiencies is by acquiring some form of hybrid structure that has the best of both worlds.
But how exactly should this happen? This by itself is not examined in this book, but there are a few scattered ideas that can provide some insight. First, closer collaboration with pro-democracy and human rights NGOs may help in detecting and possibly avoiding netwar confrontations before they happen. If, for example, in the case of the Zapatistas, governments had not ignored the human rights and environmental protection NGOs that had been begging to draw their attention to what was happening in Chiapas, the formation of the EZLN and its attacks could have been avoided.
Second, collaboration between different agencies and governments needs to increase. The best example of the shortcomings of not having this interagency collaboration is the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. These actually happened as the book was being finished, so a foreword was added on this. Before 9/11, there were some antiterrorism alliances that had been formed among agencies, such as the Technical Support Working Group (p. 54), or the Los Angeles’ Terrorism Early Warning Group (p. 124), but they were not strong enough. It is speculated that the attacks could have been prevented if there had been better communication among agencies, which led to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security shortly thereafter. This department will in theory be able to better coordinate information flow and actions among different agencies in order to deter terrorist networks from attacking.
Third, coordinated hierarchies should have the ability to attack in a pseudo-swarm fashion: a coordinated simultaneous attack from multiple fronts on multiple targets. This kind of attacks are the ones that, for example, carry out international police coalitions in joint undercover operations against drug trafficking or money laundering; for example, Operation Green Ice (p. 96) which involved eight countries and produced 200 arrests.
In Colombia we find an example of a hierarchical state using non-government networks to challenge terrorist networks. The government of the recently elected president has decided that the best way to stop guerrilla attacks throughout the countryside is to create networks of civilian informants. Civilians have been instructed on how to properly acquire and provide information for the law enforcement agencies. For now, after six months of implementing the system, this approach has proven some success in deterring terrorist attacks. There are two opposing view to this approach: on the one hand, it is the duty of every civilian to collaborate with law enforcement agencies to prevent crimes; on the other hand, creating this networks of informants has created the sensation of getting civilians in the middle of the fire. This raises another interesting question: when the hybrid structure of a government or law enforcement agency includes civilian in its networked structures, are civilians no longer neutral? Can they become then military objectives?
Conclusions
Arquilla and Ronfeldt propose in their book a new way of characterizing certain modes of conflict. They denominate it netwar, explain the characteristics that define it and analyze what makes a netwarrior successful. The point of view of the authors is mostly biased towards the counternetwarrior perspective.
The authors concede that netwars are not something new. However, netwars have indeed become more common lately since new information technology facilitates the formation and survival of networked structures. Their purpose in finding commonalities among different netwars is to find effective government policy and organizational changes that help in defending against netwarriors when their purposes are contrary or using them when their goals are aligned. The issue of how to adapt hierarchical governments and institutions to challenge netwarriors or have similar strategic advantages is lightly touched upon; however, it can be drawn from the book that this might happen by more collaboration with NGOs, more interagency information flow without having to go through the usual hierarchical structures and creating the ability to attack in a pseudo-swarm manner.
Given the examples that are studied in the book and those that are mentioned, it is apparent that networked organizations are better poised than hierarchies for disruption or destruction, rather than constructive change.
References
[Arquilla 2001] Arquilla,
John and David Ronfeldt, “Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime and
Militancy”. National Defense Research Institute, RAND, 2001.
[Arquilla 1993] Arquilla,
John and David Ronfeldt, “Cyberwar is Coming!” Comparative Strategy, Vol. 12,
No. 2, Summer 1993, pp. 141 - 165.
[Arquilla 1999] Arquilla,
John and David Ronfeldt, “The Emergence of Noopolitik: Toward an American
Information Strategy”. RAND, 1999.
[Arquilla 2000] Arquilla,
John and David Ronfeldt, “Swarming and the Future of Conflict”. RAND, 2000