Review Essay - The Strategy of Terrorism – How it Works and Why it Fails

The Strategy of Terrorism – How it Works and Why it Fails

Written by: Peter R Neumann and Michael LR Smith, 

Routledge, London, 2008,

ISBN: 9780415545266, 140pp.

Reviewed by: Major Jason Harley

This book is a valuable contribution to military studies. Terrorism is a most misunderstood term in both society and academia, and for military practitioners equally so. While the book explores the strategic aspects of terrorism in first principles, it is written in a simple clear manner. It unearths a number of flawed assumptions in popular understandings and ideas, bringing the study of terrorism back on the track of rational inquiry. Terrorism is misunderstood because it is a word that is essentially an abstract noun, devoid of actors or materials. Within general societal discourse, the word ‘terrorism’ is laden with many implicit socio-cultural assumptions. These assumptions need to be understood because they affect the critical study of terrorism and its application to domestic policy.

Common Misunderstandings of Terrorism

The first assumption implicit in the popular understanding of terrorism is that it automatically uses violent methods. While this is a typical observation, this is not necessarily so, as the production of fear can be generated without resort to violence (e.g. animal rights activism). It is important to make this point because many activities undertaken by terrorist organisations are in fact non-violent. It would seem that while violent actions are newsworthy, verbal threats issued by terrorist organisations do create fear in the target audience. The second assumption is that terrorism is implicitly immoral. And while many acts of terrorism are clearly horrendous, this assumption interferes with understanding the processes of strategic formulation within the minds of terrorists. In studying terrorism we are not necessarily interested in the moral question itself, but the thinking processes of the terrorist in order to apply Sun Tzu’s maxim ‘know thy enemy as well as yourself’.

The third assumption is that terrorists operate in some sort of irrational ethical void. While some terrorists may be mentally unstable, it is a leap of reasoning to assume all terrorists are mentally unstable. Especially in the context of Western militaries where in any case up to 3 per cent of soldiers may be sociopaths.¹ The fourth assumption is that terrorism is the ‘weapon of the weak’. While this is a valid assumption in some cases, it is not a universal principle, especially since state actors as well as non-state actors conduct terrorism.

One flawed approach in studying terrorism is the popular crusade in search of the ‘root causes’ of terrorism. These ‘root causes’ have been typically understood as a product of environmental factors such as poverty, ethnic suppression and economic inequality; resulting in despair and alienation. But of the hundreds of thousands of alienated youths that exist in Western countries (a typical terrorist recruitment demographic), only a very small minority actually chose terrorism as a mode of operation. As an analogy, all terrorists breath oxygen, but that does not mean oxygen is the cause of terrorism. Therefore ‘root causes’ are hardly a good starting point for research and policy.

Without understanding the limitations of these bias and assumptions, one is automatically led to the conclusion that terrorists operate outside the realm of rational activity. The problem with using these assumptions is we potentially assume terrorism is an irrational response to a rational escalation of problems. The assumption that terrorism is the product of irrational people clearly does not fit the flawed but rational ‘root cause’ model in any case. How can you declare that the ‘root causes’ of terrorism are rational when your assumptions of terrorists imply that they are irrational? Hence, all assumptions need clarification in order to avoid category mistakes. Assuming terrorism is fundamentally abnormal leads to a skewed research agenda. When one assumes that terrorism is irrational then one effectively rules out the possibility of understanding the phenomena.

Another issue is the inaccurate fuzzy language many commentators use to communicate the phenomena of terrorism. The search for the ‘root causes of terrorism’ is as flawed as the notion of a ‘war on terror’... or a ‘war on war’. Abstract nouns have no causes. Effectively those who solely argue for a ‘root cause’ of terrorism may miss crucial opportunities to objectively evaluate the phenomena of terrorism. Instead terror is transvalued to serve the political preferences of state or anti-state agenda rather than understanding the issues at hand. In order to bring the study of terrorism back on track, a better starting point is to understand terrorism as the use of military strategy by actors who believe, rightly or wrongly, that through such means they can advance their goals. This unashamedly follows the Clausewitzian dictum that ‘war is politics by other means’. In this context, terrorism is an act of force to compel an enemy to do our will. This is a better starting point than assuming terrorism as simply a product of ‘root causes’ or a nihilistic immoral irrational act that defies enquiry.

Fear as an Instrument of Terrorism

Terrorism can be defined as a ‘deliberate creation of a sense of fear, usually by the use or threat of use of symbolic acts of physical violence to influence the political behaviour of a given target group’. This highlights some important facets, namely that the violent quality of most terror acts focuses on inducement of fear. Also the nature of violence is ‘extra-normal’, that is it must go beyond the normal limits of acceptable violence in society and communicate the symbolic character of any violent acts. Thus the aim of any strategy of terrorism is not to attrite or kill but to break the spirit and create a sensation of fear within the target to initiate political change. Terrorism is therefore a form of psychological warfare: a battle of wills played out in peoples minds. So while third generation warfare (manoeuvre warfare) proponents saw the application of strategy to influence and destroy the will of the enemy commander, terrorism represents an application of strategy that influences and destroys the will of the target audience. Both are contextually different, yet both can be explained within the Clausewitzian paradigm.

Why Terrorism is a Flawed Strategic Option

The Strategy of Terrorism discusses research that supports the idea that terrorism is generally not a successful strategy for achieving goals. As early as 1991, researcher Leonard Weinberg found that of the seventy-five terrorist organisations he studied, none stood a decent chance of surviving for more than ten years. The common experience for terrorist organisations is not success, but failure and disappearance. Recently, Max Abrahms reproduced similar conclusions, stating that only 7 per cent of terror groups in history (Irgun and FLN) have achieved their aims, and even then the link between the terrorist organisations’ operations and the factors that shaped ‘success’ remain somewhat doubtful.² The obvious idea that drives terrorist organisations is that overwhelming fear creates desired change within the target audience. However, even these ideas are flawed.

The first flawed strategic idea is that terrorism creates stress that undermines society. While terrorism in the United States kills less people than lightning strikes or allergic reactions to peanut butter, it is the sensationalised fear that creates disorientation. While fear and mental discomfort is a cost to society, it does not completely dislocate the supporting pillars of society, unless that society is already very weak. Society does actually manage to continue and PTSD studies conducted after the recent London bombings, 11 September 2001, and the Madrid train bombing conclude that PTSD effects were surprisingly low. Within days of the event, the majority of the population generally recovered their sense of routine. Residual levels of disquiet did continue within the minds of the target audience, but overall, people coped fairly well and did not disengage from society or succumb to paranoia. So while terrorist organisations aim to achieve complete societal dislocation, at best they can only achieve moderate disorientation.

The second flawed strategic idea is misjudging the level of resilience that resides in target populations. This idea proceeds on the notion that disorientation is more pronounced when terrorist acts are not ‘one-off events’ but are part of an ongoing campaign design to wear down the target audience. Terrorist organisations believe that ongoing terrorist activities will produce chronic fear that will tip target audiences ‘over the edge’. Yet terrorism is shocking and disturbing not because of the violence involved but primarily because it is ‘extra-normal’. A degree of violence exists in all societies and most people cope with ‘normalised violence’ such as pub brawls. Even in the most crime-ridden cities, ordinary people manage their fears. So the advent of repetitious terrorist acts is likely to create normalising, coping mechanisms rather than disorientation. This situation creates a ‘law of diminishing returns’ especially if terrorist attacks occur at regular intervals, at similar targets, using recycled modes of operation. Obviously from a terrorist point of view, the application of surprise would defeat any onset of normalisation of the target audience. However, there is doubt that most terrorist organisations have the real ability to maintain high tempo operations and the momentum of surprise and unpredictability over long periods of time, especially from an organisational resource perspective. Any rapid paradigm changes in tactics will increase the likelihood of mission failure due to lack of prior experience and learning, imploding internal cohesion and further expose terrorist organisations to detection. Extended terror campaigns ranging from the Second World War air raid bombings in Europe right through to the extended Palestinian terror campaigns have eventually led to numbing and indifference rather than disorientation. In fact rather than achieving the terrorist’s aim of instilling chronic debilitating fear in large sectors of the target audience, it has produced resilience.

The third flawed strategic idea is propagating the ‘blame game’. It is typical for terrorist organisations to target governments in their information operations in order to discredit them. Terrorist organisations aim to force governments into over-reaction with the hope that target audiences view governments as brutal and oppressive. The other course of action is to force governments into under-action, where government loses legitimacy because it cannot protect its people. Douhet, the famous Italian air power theorist, promoted the idea that massive aerial bombardments of towns would cause such fear and dread that target audiences would rise up against their government. While Douhet’s theories have been criticised as unethical they are also clearly unworkable. The strategic Second World War bombings on London and Germany as well as the strategic bombing of North Vietnam did nothing to weaken target audience opinion of homeland government. In fact, for the United States in Vietnam it was actually part of its strategic undoing. These conventional examples provide useful pointers for terrorism. Namely that blame and legitimacy cannot be effectively influenced by terrorist organisations unless government legitimacy is already too low. The IRA experienced the ‘blame game’ backfire when they commenced its terrorist offensive on the British homeland in the early 1980s. The IRA was aware that the British public were uncomfortable with government policy on Northern Ireland. The IRA believed that bringing the fight onto British soil would knock Britain out of its complacency and force the British Government to reverse their long-standing policy. The IRA was completely right in their assessment of the high ambiguous nature of British public opinion but completely wrong in assuming terror attacks would align British public opinion to the IRA cause. The end result: British public opinion regal-vanised in support of tougher measures against the IRA.

The fourth flawed strategic idea is that the government in power has a ‘breaking point’. A prolonged terrorist campaign against the government will create a situation in which governments will dissolve, hand over power or compromise terms to the wishes of terrorist organisations. This idea draws its origins from the many examples of separatist or anti-colonial campaigns involving indigenous populations against colonial governments after the Second World War. While there is great strength in the nationalistic causes of indigenous populations against foreign colonial powers, it is difficult to transfer that ‘template’ to countries where strongly indigenous, homogenously cultural-ethnic, or strongly democratic population exists. Yet this has been the thinking of many terrorist organisations such as the IRA, who were captive to the ‘template’ of British failure in Aden. Also Fatah (PLO) studied and routinely used FLN’s methods used in Algeria. Hence ‘templating’ the methods of Irgun and FLN is dangerously flawed as both campaigns were in the context of foreign colonial occupation where regime legitimacy was already dramatically low and opportunities to fill power vacuums were plenty.

The Escalation Paradox

War is a clash of two living organisms each seeking to achieve its aims. Clausewitz supported this idea when he stated that ‘if the enemy is to be coerced, you must put him in a situation that is more unpleasant than yours’.³ Because war is a reactive environment, the only way to deal with Clausewitz’s maxim is to ‘escalate’. However, escalation is a difficult task for terrorist organisations because of the following question: if the strategy of terrorism fails to sustain an adequate level of fear, how can it escalate that level of fear without further recourse to greater physical destruction? The tension existing in any strategy of terrorism is that terrorists aim to wrestle legitimacy from governments by maximising the impact of attacks, while minimising death and injury to the target population. Yet if a terror campaign is to succeed it must create sustained fear and crisis through an information operation supported by continued indiscriminate attacks. Hence the impulse for terrorist organisations is to ‘escalate’, otherwise they risk becoming irrelevant. But the paradox working against them is the loss of target audience support. The indiscriminate nature of attacks creates more anxiety, yet it also potentially erodes target audience support for terrorist organisations. And herein lies the problem: terrorist organisations can easily create fear, but the real problem is sustaining that fear. The Clauswitzian escalation trap is further realised when a terror campaign provokes a counter-escalation response from a target government. In the case of Uruguay and Argentina, the standing government of the day successfully wiped out terrorist organisations despite using brutal widespread measures. Even liberal democracies have and are willing to defend their position and harshly deal with threats. The escalation paradox is a real issue that any strategy of terrorism needs to deal with in order to achieve its aims; however, the historical hit rate and the nature of terrorist organisations suggest that mission success is slim.

The Strategy of Terrorism ends with case studies highlighting the flawed strategic ideas of two terrorist organisations and why they failed to deal effectively with the Escalation Paradox: the Gamaat Islamiya (GI) group of Eygpt in 1992–97 and the IRA in Northern Ireland 1972. In both of these situations, the terrorist organisations’ decision to escalate violence provided the perfect excuse for government security forces to increase security measures and operational tempo. The end result: repressive government measures countering the threat received support from a wide cross section of society.

Concluding Remarks

Although some conclusions on specific terrorist organisations and outcomes may invoke disagreement or debate, the military strategy aspects of this book are immense. A strategy of terrorism is not about trying to neutralise the power of a stronger opponent, but about influencing its behaviour in a manner that favours the goals and interests of the terrorists. However, time and time again, those who have sought to implement a strategy of terrorism have chosen to ignore the fundamental power correlations that exist between the target and the terrorist, leaving them prone to ill-considered acts of escalation. The most frequent outcome being political and military failure—or disappearing into irrelevance.

Endnotes

1     ‘An Anatomy of Killing – Aggressive Predisposition of the Killer’ in D A Grossman, On Killing – The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, Back Bay Books, Boston, 1996, p. 182.

2     Peter R Neumann and Michael L R Smith, The Strategy of Terrorism – How it Works and Why it Fails, Routledge, London, 2008, p. 56.

3     Ibid., p. 78.