In H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, the Morlocks are carnivorous ape-like industrialized creatures of the night who live underground and control the future world. Descended from humans, they prey on surface dwellers, the Eloi, who live an Eden-like existence.
The world today is similarly divided between surface dwellers and subterranean predators. During Operation Desert Storm, U.S. forces identified and destroyed targets from above, using air superiority and satellite imagery, with devastating effect. Observing and adapting, our enemies evolved. As recent experience with the Taliban and Saddam Hussein have shown, when they want to challenge the West, our enemies—figuratively and sometimes literally—now go underground. This subterranean orientation will be the warfare style of our most dangerous adversaries for the near future.
The Morlockean Assymetry
The term "asymmetric warfare" is recent, but the concept has been around a long time.
Sappers became famous in the Napoleonic wars, tunneling unseen below fortifications, planting charges, causing walls to crumble and breach. In World War II, the Japanese built significant underground defensive fortifications. The Koreans, who frequently were used as labor on these fortifications, returned home and added that experience to their colonial mining experience.
The Korean War was one of the first conflicts in which U.S. air superiority was a "given," and the North Koreans adapted. After the war, North Korea evolved as arguably the most tunneled nation in the world—underground airfield and tunnel entries with hairpin bends that confound missiles; military facilities and defense plants buried deep within the earth; submarine pens carved out of rock; hardened artillery sites tunneled into mountainsides. Artillery pieces, on rails, can come out, fire, and retire into the mountain like cuckoos in Swiss clocks. North Korea's skills were well-known, and during the Vietnam War, it lent tunnel engineers to North Vietnam.
In Vietnam, again the United States held air superiority, and the North Vietnamese Army elected to go underground. The warren of tunnels of Cu Chi, now preserved as a national treasure, is an example of North Vietnamese ingenuity.1
During the 1980s, in Afghanistan, the Mujihadeen enlarged irrigation cuts known as karez and employed commercial tunnel-building equipment to foil another air power, the Soviets, and in recent years the Taliban has used the same techniques against the United States.
Below the Radar
Our enemies, terrorists and others, know they must remain unseen, if they are to survive. U.S. superiority in dogfighting and delivering ordnance from above is only part of the picture. Our enemies know they also must elude our intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) systems.
We think first in terms of caves—the most primitive form of concealment—when we think of underground enemies. In January 2002, a SEAL platoon "illuminated" the caves of Zhawar Kili in Afghanistan. The complex included 50 natural caves, some "improved" caves and tunnels, and a few aboveground structures, and was used by al Qaeda and the Taliban to concentrate and conceal significant resources. At the cost of 450,000 pounds of naval air ordnance and no American lives, U.S. forces destroyed an army's worth of enemy ordnance and the enemy's elaborate rock honeycomb. The key to success at Zhawar Kili was using forces intensely familiar with the tactics of concealment to ferret out key lairs and caches.
But we must not confine our thinking here to small bands of terrorists. North Korea has a vast tunnel system. Iraq clearly devoted much effort to placing key military facilities underground after Operation Desert Storm. Nor should we confine our thinking to natural underground formations. Every major city is a warren of man-made, reinforced concrete caves. Consider this from an Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs report:
The smugglers in Rafah are now experts in digging tunnels and smuggling weapons. The smugglers transport weapons for terrorist organizations, or for other elements that order firearms in exchange for money, and transfer money to Palestinians and Egyptians who own the house or land while the tunnel is dug.
They are adept at how to avoid detection of the tunnels, thus they build them in residential areas and use small children to construct the tunnels and smuggle the weapons.2
Neither should we think in terms of land warfare exclusively. Caves and concrete buildings are not the only places to avoid the light of day.
We also must think in terms of submerged lairs. Our enemies need not be so advanced as to have sub pens or submarines. During World War II, the frogmen of Italy's Decima Flotiglia Mas used the Olterra, an interned freighter under Spanish guard, as a clandestine base for attacking ships in Gibraltar.3 From a flooded compartment below the Olterra's waterline, through a hole cut in her hull, the Italian Navy launched teams of frogmen who attached limpet mines to British vessels. They remained undetected throughout the course of the war. In this instance, the merchant crew of the Olterra knew what their naval cousins were about. With the advent of containerized cargo, merchant ships and their crews easily could become unwitting hosts to Morlocks.
Hiding in a Sea of People
Science may help with the physical identification of lairs and caches, but distinguishing between noncombatants and Morlocks will be a far greater and more complex challenge. Despite the requirements of the Geneva Conventions, it appears that fewer and fewer of our enemies will bear weapons openly or wear identifying uniforms in the future. If this is the case, we will have to find ways of assigning them invisible uniforms.
Pressure to prosecute wars with fewer civilian casualties and less collateral damage, coupled with adversaries more inclined to defy the Geneva Conventions, will make field identification a problem of growing importance. We will have to develop a means of "marking" friends and foes in a contested area using intelligence data, gunpowder or explosives residue sensors, DNA and stress analyzers, and perhaps even remotely fired invisible paintball markers.
The future may see a Morlock marker that would be usable at great distance to indelibly mark persons who might become the equivalents of Osama Bin Laden, Mulla Omar, or their confederates. Or as an alternative, it may see some form of detecting goggles linked to a database and sensors to distinguish threatening from nonthreatening individuals in the field. Why only mark or identify those whom you might as easily dispatch? Similar to the techniques of effective pest control, it is first necessary to follow Morlocks to identify their points of concentration.
The advent of remote-sensing satellites is making it increasingly difficult to hide information. The trend toward transparency must be must be harnessed to distinguish civilians from enemy combatants.4 Technology cannot be a substitute for human intelligence work, but it can be a valuable supplement.
Hunters Who Cross Cultural Borders
Our Morlock adversaries are going to use the transnational movement, i.e., criss-crossing borders as a tactic, against us. They are going to hide in as many countries and among as many backward and unsophisticated cultures as they can, thereby "playing the borders of the map." They may not always dive vertically out of the light; they may dive horizontally, across a geopolitical or cultural border to safety. We can train competent warriors, but can we develop transcultural hunters? Perhaps we can, if we give them the correct tools.
Americans are known for (1) technical gimmickry and (2) not learning foreign languages. Both have been impediments to prosecution of asymmetric war. However, items such as the Phraselator™, a palm-held "robot" that provides quick translations in the field, will help our Morlock hunters overcome our national failings.5 We must seek other ways of allowing our hunters to track Morlocks across several cultures and seek other ways to minimize our "foreignness."
Perfect and Adapt
We have engaged an enemy that scurries from the light and seeks to control the surface of the world. We must perfect our night vision and adapt our intelligence, special operations, and engineer forces to hunt down our Morlocks wherever they hide, in caves, crowds, or cultures.
Captain Crossland served as a SEAL officer in Vietnam and was mobilized as a reserve officer for duty with Naval Special Warfare Group One in Southwest and Central Asia as part of Operation Enduring Freedom in 2002. In civilian life he is a trial lawyer.
1. Seth Mydans, "Visit the Vietcong's World: Americans Welcome," The New York Times, 7 July 1999; and Tom Mangold and John Penycate, The Tunnels of Cu Chi (New York: Random House, 1985). back to article
2. Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs Report, "Weapons Smuggling in Rafah—Operation Rainbow," 17 May 2003. back to article
3. J. Valerio Borghese, The Sea Devils: Italian Naval Commandos in World War II (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, MD), 1995. back to article
4. Ann M. Florini and Yahya Dehaqnzada, "Commercial Satellite Imagery Comes of Age," Issues in Science and Technology, p. 46. back to article
5. The Phraselator, built by VoxTec, translates spoken English into other tongues. "Elevate Your Hands or I Ignite," The Economist, 26 August 2004. back to article