Failure of Open Source Warfare?

Islamic State of Iraq

Mismanaged Savagery?

(Image from Wikipedia)

Over at the Belmont Club, Richard Fernandez, who calls himself "Wretchard," makes a useful observation about the critical weakness of a "networked insurgency" like that of Iraq:

Much has been written about the supposed invincibility of the networked insurgency and less about its single most glaring weakness. Movements loosely held together only by a "shared narrative" and decentralized command structures are vulnerable, like most historical religions in their expansionary phase to schism and bitter infighting. After all, why should Osama Bin Laden's version of the Jihad be any better than anyone else's? Once prophecy becomes the basis of political discourse before long there will be a prophet on every street corner.

Wretchard makes this point in connection with his analysis on the failure of the insurgency calling itself "Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn," but better known as Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Wretchard is thinking of analysts such as Jamais Cascio, who earlier this year wrote an article, "The End of Conventional War" (May 6, 2007), for the online site Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. According to Cascio:

Few would dispute that the American military is, far and away, the most powerful conventional armed force on the planet, even as depleted as it is by the Iraq war. At the same time, few would dispute that this military force is, and by all signs will continue to be, insufficient to quell the insurgency in Iraq.

Cascio explains:

The reasons for this obsolescence are clear: conventional military forces appear to be unable to defeat a networked insurgency, which combines the information age's distributed communication and rapid learning with the traditional guerilla's invisibility (by being indistinguishable from the populace) and low support needs. It's not just the American experience in Iraq (and, not as widely discussed, Afghanistan) that tells us this; Israel's latest war in Lebanon leads us to the same conclusion, and even the Soviet Union's experience in Afghanistan and America's war in Vietnam underline this same point. Insurgencies have always been hard to defeat with conventional forces, but the "open source warfare" model, where tactics can be learned, tested and communicated both formally and informally across a distributed network of guerillas, poses an effectively impossible challenge for conventional militaries.

Based on this analysis, one would never have expected the defeat of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, but that seems to be what has happened. That defeat did not occur through the US military's 'conventional' tactics but due to a combination of factors, including Al-Qaeda's 'mismanagement of savagery', Iraq's tribal politics, and the US military's technological advantage. Al-Qaeda, being led by outsiders, was never "indistinguishable from the populace," and as it alienated that same populace by its brutality, the Iraqi tribes drew on their most powerful resource, namely, group loyalty, to isolate the insurgents, who then had to face the American military's technological superiority.

What this means, I think, is that networked insurgencies will not work very well as a means of attaining power unless they are truly supported by a populace. Al-Qaeda failed in Iraq because its rigid Islamist ideology was never shared by the Iraqis, who rejected the fundamentalist Islam that Al-Qaeda tried to impose. So much for Abu Bakr Naji's "strategy for seizing territory (through fomenting chaos, i.e., 'savagery'), establishing Islamic law (Sharia), and using that base to expand the realm of Islam (Dar al-Islam) yet further."

What Wretchard calls the "glaring weakness" of a "networked insurgency" -- its vulnerability "to schism and bitter infighting" -- also applies to "open source" warfare generally, but this would appear to be a weakness mainly for networked groups attempting to take and hold territory.

Would the tendency toward schism be a weakness if the aim of networked Islamist terrorists is not primarily to take territory but to make terror?