Modern Warfare (Written in October, 2001)

In light of last month’s Terrorist Attacks and calls for war, I think this is a good moment to take a clinical look at Post-Modern Warfare, Information Systems, and the difficulty of defending a nation.

Many of us play a game called Age of Empires, an interactive strategic game that is a real hoot. In the space of just a few minutes, we create Peasants to work the fields, cavalry to scout the country, and swordsmen to go kill enemies. It’s one of those “boy” games – at least that’s the way it is at my house. After the fall of Rome up to about 1300 AD, nations spent years raising and cultivating armies. In fact, it takes about 20 years, starting at about age 8, to train an average swordsman. Same equation for archers and knights, as well. With that much time invested in their Army, Kings tended to keep their forces close to home and did not often risk losing the work of a generation in a single day.

In around the 1300s, Spain developed the first truly innovative unit and tactics since the invention of the Roman Cohort. It was called the Rifle Company. The King basically rounded all the drunks, emptied his jails, and issued them gunpowder weapons. No one else would touch them because they at times tended to explode in peoples’ faces. He put a dishonored, broke, drunk nobleman in charge and on one bloody afternoon ordered them to hold a hill while the rest of his Army retreated. This gathering of drunks and criminals had actually come together as a unit after about six months of fierce training and literally drove Italy’s finest field Army off the field. The Spanish King suddenly figured out that it no longer took 20 years to develop capable infantrymen but rather six months.

Simultaneously, a man named Maimonedes developed the methods of modern banking. Since the Kings could now raise combat effective armies in 6 months instead of 20 years, new and inventive ways of raising the vast sums of money to pay for these Armies had to be developed. These methods form the foundation of money, credit, interest, and the like that we know and understand, as critical parts of modern day banking. Quite simply, Gunpowder weapons and new banking methods gave Kings and Princes vast new power and enabled them to assemble massive armies in short periods of time and project their power far beyond their borders.

Increasingly deadly wars and ever larger Armies continued with the Industrial Revolution really up until the 20^th century. As our society shifted away from the Modern Age to the Post Modern, warfare shifted, as well. Most Americans did not pay much attention to this shift until last Tuesday, but we still see and hear evidence of the old ways of thinking in the Press and at the Water Cooler. World War I was the ultimate expression of Mass in warfare. The advantage was to the defense. World War II demonstrated the importance of mobility as the Tank and Airplane presented a much larger three dimensional battlefield. The advantage shifted to the Offense. As the 20^th Century progressed, we moved toward a very different world where one shot equaled one kill.

Warfare changed with the dramatic success of hyper-accurate weapons systems. It no longer took a B52 bomber load of bombs to take out a tank or two. Instead, we had stealth fighters dropping bombs able to “fly” through windows and down chimneys to destroy targets. All of this depends on information systems, coordination through sophisticated communications methods, and highly trained specialists. Events of last Tuesday demonstrated in a very public way the new nature of Post-Modern Warfare. Mass and firepower did not take us down. Instead, it was a small group of highly trained individuals using information to develop their attacks and sophisticated communications (cell phones) to synchronize their attacks. The combination of technology, information, and sophisticated communications methods has now made ever smaller groups of individuals dramatically more deadly over the last 20 years.

I link this to the Post-Modern mind set because we have people like these terrorists doing the exact same things that the High Priests and Sanhedrin did in their trial of Christ. They are taking pieces of their ceremonial law, twisting it on the fly, and using the output to justify horrible evil. In doing so, they deliberately set aside Moral Law because it is no longer convenient. This is nothing new but in a Post Modern age that equals subjective truth on steroids, we have no solid truths with which to confront those who raise their children to die for Allah in a blast of flame, aluminum, and crumbling concrete. Equipping these children with the information, technology, and communications equipment of the present, the terrorists have very small groups of supremely deadly people who are very hard to detect and stop.

Ramping up for this “War” is necessary but we must understand the context. The terrorists have no cities, no production facilities, no air fields, and no Army bases. They essentially live the modern Nomad life, transferring their survival skills from the mountains of central Asia to the equally hostile turf of the modern day city. They do not require much in the way of life support until it is time to send them against a target. These terrorists require two things that make them vulnerable to attack. First, they require leadership. Terrorist cells are really not worth much without a leadership structure that plans and coordinates their attacks. The Israelis have proven that a sustained assassination campaign against the middle tiers of PLO leadership is superbly effective in destroying the ability of the PLO to coordinate and launch meaningful terrorist attacks. They did this through superb Human Intelligence agents – spies – and development of acquired information. Our problem is that beginning with Senator Frank Church of Idaho, our government has emasculated our national intelligence agencies by destroying and defunding our Human Intelligence capabilities. The ultimate expression of this effort came during the Clinton administration. Many people remember the President in his first term sending 20 billion dollars to Mexico to bail out their economy. Well, that money came from the President’s personal discretionary fund and Congress could not stop him from spending it any way he wanted to. Basically, that money was the Intelligence budget for the CIA and NSA.

The second thing that makes terrorists vulnerable is their requirement for information. This information – technical and tactical – comes to them through cell phones, email, web sites, and so on. It includes targeting, time schedules, coordination for future meetings and communications, etc. It is often encrypted and when assisted by a friendly nation, the terrorist has at his disposal critically important assets that will help guarantee operational security and secure communications channels. This is an important vulnerability because it requires infrastructure. A lucky break in this area could let us get inside the terrorists’ planning and execution cycle. Yet, this lucky break will almost certainly have to come through some form of Human Intelligence.

Playing Age of Empires on my home network allows my son and me to compress thousands of years of development and warfare into a fun, two hour afternoon. As I think on this capability in my basement, I see a similar compression of technology and warfare in our modern age. It is truly exponential and I think it is only a matter of time before we cross a threshold of lethality far worse than the one crossed, last Tuesday.