The capture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, alleged planner of the 11 September 2001 atrocities and the number three officer in al Qaeda, has interesting implications for a network-- centric approach to the war against terrorism. Khalid has been described as the institutional memory of al Qaeda, the man through whom all major plots had to be cleared, and the man to whom every operative of the dispersed organization reported. He was constantly in communication using cell phones and e-mail. Presumably, his computer, if it can be read, will provide masses of crucial intelligence information regarding both plans and al Qaeda personnel. Presumably, too, U.S. intelligence had some way of monitoring Khalid's communications traffic, even if it could not use that monitoring to track him down. It was an increase in Khalid's traffic that caused U.S. officials to raise the national alert level some weeks ago.
If indeed Khalid was the key man, then he alone may have known who was an al Qaeda operative. Naturally, the emphasis among commentators has been on how (or whether) his brain can be unlocked. The issue of torture naturally arises, but apart from legal bars, there is the problem that subjects who talk under torture may invent false information simply to spare themselves further pain. That problem is not limited to victims of torture; many intelligence men remember Soviet defectors who, having used up what they knew, kept inventing things so they would continue to be paid.
Imagine, then, that Khalid's interrogation might yield far less than might be hoped. Clearly, the U.S. government still will benefit from the elimination of a key officer within al Qaeda, and it is in U.S. interests to seize a chief author of the 11 September outrage. Clearly, too, Khalid was an effective planner, and in his absence al Qaeda may be unable to do anything as ambitious as 11 September. It may even be that he and a few others are the sole focal points in a dispersed mass of al Qaeda operatives, and thus that they are the targets worth pursuing.
Some years ago two RAND experts published a book about a new form of warfare they called Netwar. They argued that cellular terrorist groups are immune to conventional attack, because they offer no physical point of concentration against which the usual sort of force can be used. They are far too small to detect, and they can be disciplined sufficiently to hide for years. They might not even make much attempt to communicate with each other, and there is no head office to capture. By now it is notorious that al Qaeda operatives were told to conceal themselves by acting as though they were nothing like pious fanatics. For example, they were never to attend mosques whose Imams preached jihad. They were encouraged to break the usual Muslim rules. Secretly they would know that they were honoring Allah by preparing for the great jihad against the Great Satan. When the day came, they could emerge suddenly and effectively. Surely no intelligence system could detect them. If they operated cleverly, they could even do without telltale financing from centers abroad.
Anyone who fought U-boats in World War II dealt with exactly such a dispersed threat. Normally, U-boats traveled alone. They concentrated when necessary, but merely searching the North Atlantic for them would be pointless. Much the same could be said of the Cold War Soviet antiship fleet of submarines and surface ships. They were supplied with long-range missiles so they did not have to concentrate physically to attack Western naval formations. Again, there seemed little point in simply scouring the ocean in search of such ships, particularly since entirely reasonable rules of engagement precluded attacking them until they opened the war by attacking us. In any case, without any way of knowing just when the Soviets would strike, what could the U.S. Navy do?
The Navy brilliantly recast the problem in a way informed by what we would now call network-centric warfare. In the case of both the U-boats and the Soviet fleet, there really was a point of concentration, which was the information the enemy needed to attack. In each case, the individual attackers could not see very far. They depended on a central source of information to guide them. If anything happened to that central source, they were in fatal trouble. In the case of the U-boats, Allied code breakers and radio intercept operators exploited the fact that someone had to collect targeting information and dispense it. For their part, the U-boats had to tell their central controllers how much fuel and ammunition they had left on board. Thus, each U-boat had to transmit regularly. The Allies found they could intercept even very short U-boat messages.
The measures taken against the Soviet fleet reflect another sort of information-oriented attack. If the Soviet command relied on dispersed sensing to find its targets, perhaps the information collected by the sensors was the best peacetime target. Experience seemed to show that the Soviet information system could handle only a limited number of targets simultaneously. Could the number of targets be multiplied to the point where the Soviets could no longer track them? One way to do that was to deploy nuclear-armed Tomahawk missiles on surface ships. In the past, the Soviets had concentrated on U.S. aircraft carriers, which were the only U.S. surface ships capable of launching nuclear strikes. Once the same could be said of most cruisers and destroyers, the situation deteriorated.
That deterioration opened the Soviets to another information-- oriented attack. If their tracking system was barely functioning, it could not deal with deception. The U.S. Navy publicized its interest in a variety of deceptive devices, such as noisemakers that made a destroyer sound like a carrier and false-target generators that could fool a radar satellite. It rather carefully concealed the appearance of the devices, so that the Soviets could never be sure of whether (or in what quantities) they were deployed. The hope was that simple fear of deception would slow any initial Soviet naval offensive. That delay would give the U.S. Navy a chance to deal with the deployed Soviet antiship force.
Does a tiny secret cell of fanatics carefully buried in a big city really need any contact with Khalid or with anyone else? The way Khalid has been described suggests that the cell really does need help from a larger entity. The one thing the cell lacks is sufficient information to be sure that anyone who turns up from the central office really is who he says he is. He cannot simply carry an ID card, because our own intelligence forces might have seized just such a card, and might have copied it to infiltrate the cell. Nor will a secret handshake do, because it takes only one defector to give that away. Knowing the new man would certainly help, and readers will note how many al Qaeda men are described as having been in Afghanistan for training. What mattered more than the training was that they met each other—Afghanistan was their security office.
The U.S.-led attack on Afghanistan destroyed many of those who could assure the cells of their bona fides. What happens now, when someone new approaches cell members? Until a few weeks ago, they still had a security registry in the person of Khalid. It is not too different from what happens when you visit a classified facility. At some point, generally before the visit, someone has to be assured that Mr. X, who is about to visit, is indeed a trusted person. When the visitor actually arrives, he has to convince the security personnel that he is indeed the Mr. X who has been vouched for. Once formal security information is gone, the secret lab is not nearly so secret anymore—and, by analogy, the terrorist cell is no longer watertight. Whoever turns up for the secret meeting to plan an atrocity may be an FBI agent rather than a fellow terrorist.
But that FBI man still has to find the terrorist cell to infiltrate. Is there any way to get the terrorists to come to their enemies, preferably without their realizing that they are doing so? Decades ago the police learned they could create fake criminal organizations and make them attractive enough for criminals to want to join. Criminals have little idea of mutual security and do not operate in disciplined cells. It takes something more than credulity to net terrorists. Without a security apparatus, however, the terrorists have to choose between paralysis (with safety) and unsafe action. Those paralyzed are not too serious a problem. We care about those still willing to kill us, those who would find themselves attracted by the prospect of action even if they cannot verify that those involved are genuine.
In the terrorist context, then, the security forces would have to create false terrorist plots far too attractive to ignore. In the absence of security information, terrorists would find it difficult to distinguish real from false plots. Moreover, once a sting had succeeded, terrorists might well be reluctant to join even real plots, for fear that they were false. Eliminating Khalid and many of those who knew most other al Qaeda terrorists from Afghanistan is a major step toward making a sting strategy possible. It is an information-oriented attack on a physically dispersed enemy, very much in the spirit of network-centric warfare, which emphasizes the information content of war. It also is very much in the tradition of earlier naval strategies that emphasized the role of information.