John Arquilla is Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He is a renowned strategist, whose writings predicted the transformation from terrorist organisations to terrorist networks as early as the 1990s. His publications on networks and netwars continue to be amongst the most innovative in the field.
Madrid11: Why do the Israelis find it so hard to defeat Hezbollah?
John Arquilla: The Israelis are treating Hezbollah as if they were another nation. They believe that through traditional forms of strategic bombing or occupation of territory, they can disable this network.
Unfortunately that’s not the case. Hezbollah is made up of many dispersed cells, and for all the heavy weaponry deployed by the Israelis, they have done precious little damage to the Hezbollah fighters.
About three fourths of all the casualties the Israelis have inflicted have been on civilians. The casualties Hezbollah has inflicted, however, are three fourths on Israeli soldiers.
I am not trying to excuse the rocket attacks on civilians in Israel, which I think are very wrong. But what we see is that the network is very resilient, even when pitted against one of the world’s best traditional militaries.
Madrid11: You mentioned the idea of a network. How is this war different from, say, the traditional concept of guerrilla warfare?
John Arquilla: Netwar – that is, the way a network fights – is very different from traditional irregular warfare. There are small bands of fighters which operate with a great deal of autonomy. They are not centrally controlled. They have great freedom of action, and they tend to fight head on with a regular force. Guerrilla fighters, on the other hand, would tend to hit and run in remote places, and stay in hiding as much as they possibly can.
As we’ve seen, these small bands have done what my RAND Corporation colleague David Ronfeldt and I have referred to as ‘swarming’. Through this technique, the small bands can take on much larger, much less flexible forces. In fact, I saw a foreshadowing of this about ten years ago, in the first Russo-Chechen war, when small bands of fighters drove the Russian military right out of the country.
Madrid11: How, then, should the Israelis tackle this problem?
John Arquilla: It takes a network to fight a network. The Israelis should make two adjustments. First, they should cease their strategic bombardments all over Lebanon, which achieves very little materially and does a great deal to harm their image around the world.
Second, they should develop their own small teams of fighters – what, in the American military, we call hunter networks. It seems as if they are beginning to do a bit of that, and indeed, they have had somewhat more success with their small teams of spotters who are tracking down Hezbollah cells.
But it’s a nip and tuck affair – a far more difficult fight. The world should take note of this growing power of networked organisations to stand up against even some of the most potent traditional military powers of our time.
Madrid11: Would you say that what happens in Iraq is similar to what happens in Lebanon? Are we seeing the same type of warfare?
John Arquilla: We don’t see nearly as strong a network in Iraq. Hezbollah is the A-team of networks. In Iraq, we have a very fractured kind of resistance, and much of it has already made accommodations with the occupying forces. The Shia are very quiescent. The Sunni resistance has some of this network flavour. The foreign fighters had a great deal of this, but it’s pretty evident that the the killing of Zarqawi gave us a great deal of information with which to deal them some blows.
One of the untold stories of Iraq is that Americans have been able to build their own networks with friendly Iraqi forces, but also by breaking down our own forces into smaller packets. We are doing that in Afghanistan as well.
Madrid11: So we will see more of this?
John Arquilla: Very clearly, we are now at least a decade into an era in which nations and networks go to war against each other. You could call September 11 the opening shot in the first great war between nations and networks.
As a result, we will see the militaries of established nation states beginning to build much more networked capabilities. What that means is moving away from the traditional hierarchy where a general issues a steady stream of orders right down to the private soldier. We will move towards a situation where a great deal of authority is vested even in relatively junior officers, sometimes even non-commissioned officers.
We already see that in civil society and in other forms of activism. You can observe the trend in the business world, where networks have empowered multinational corporations and even domestic businesses.
If I look at the landscape of conflict, it is very clear that the network is driving most of the conflicts, whether in Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, or even other areas of Southeast Asia. So why wouldn’t we see this in other militaries around the world as well?
