It Takes a Network to Defeat a Network

...the 9/11 attacks were carried out by one network on another network: al Qaeda against the U.S. financial and political system. Yet it was not the immediate damage of the terrorist attacks that inflicted the real cost on the United States so much as the unintended consequences of the national security state’s response. Writing in the Los Angeles Times in August 2002, before it was even clear that Iraq was to be invaded, the political scientist John Arquilla presciently pointed out the flaws in such an approach. “In a netwar, like the one we find ourselves in now, strategic bombing means little, and most networks don’t rely on one—or even several—great leaders to sustain and guide them,” he wrote. Faulting the George W. Bush administration for creating the Department of Homeland Security, he argued, “A hierarchy is a clumsy tool to use against a nimble network: It takes networks to fight networks, much as in previous wars it has taken tanks to fight tanks.”

It took four painful years after the invasion of Iraq to learn this lesson. Looking back at the decisive phase of the U.S. troop surge in 2007, U.S. General Stanley McChrystal summed up what had been learned. In order to take down the terrorist network of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, McChrystal wrote, his task force “had to replicate its dispersion, flexibility, and speed.” He continued: “Over time, ‘It takes a network to defeat a network’ became a mantra across the command and an eight-word summary of our core operational concept.”