Netwar Revisited: The Fight for the Future Continues

Abstract

This work continues to develop the ‘netwar’ concept that the authors introduced in 1993 and have expanded upon in their various RAND and other writings ever since. Deeper understanding of the nature, strengths and vulnerabilities of networks will prove useful in combating terrorism and transnational crime, but also in understanding militant social activism, both of the violently disruptive sort and that which aims at fostering the rise of a global civil society. This essay also assesses recent US performance in the terror war, and concludes by raising concerns over the possible rise of a new form of network-based fascism.

Acknowledgements

© RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, reproduced by kind permission.

Notes

 1. Our view differs sharply from a leading US Army assessment. Stephen Biddle, Afghanistan and the Future of Warfare: Implications for Army and Defense Policy (Carlisle Barracks, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2002), argues that Operation Enduring Freedom represented nothing new – it was just another fight between two ground forces, in which air power greatly aided one side.

 2. Recent writings on this topic include Jessica Stern, Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill (New York: Ecco Press, 2003), and Simson L. Garfinkel, ‘Leaderless Resistance Today,’ First Monday, Vol.8, No.3 (March 2003), online only at ⟨http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_3/garfinkel/index.html⟩.

 3. Technically, ‘preemption’ occurs when one is under imminent threat of attack. The Bush doctrine, which envisions using force to head off the rise of new threats, falls under what ethicists call ‘preventive war’. On the ethical dimensions of this approach to conflict, see Michael Howard et al., The Laws of War: Constraints on Warfare in the Western World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994); James Turner Johnson, Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981); and Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1977). Note that adherence to a preventive war doctrine could fuel nation- and network-based opposition to American policies in the future.

 4. From John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, The Advent of Netwar (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1996), p.76.

 5. One significant expression of these concerns is the report of the Markle Foundation Task Force on National Security in the Information Age, Protecting America's Freedom in the Information Age (New York: Markle Foundation, 2002), available online at ⟨http://www.markletaskforce.org/⟩.

 6. Recent US-published studies include David Bollier, The Rise of Netpolitik (Washington, DC: The Aspen Institute, 2003); Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 2003); Starhawk, Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2002); and David Weinberger, Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 2002). Important studies by various authors (notably Thomas Carothers, Ann Fiorini and Marina Ottaway) have been issued by the two think-tanks that are on the cutting edge for tracking and analyzing the phenomena at hand: the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (www.ceip.org), and the United States Institute for Peace (www.usip.org).

 7. Insightful new network studies include Albert-László Barabási, Linked: The New Science of Networks (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 2002); Mark Buchanan, Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks (New York: Norton & Company, 2002); Fritjof Capra, The Hidden Connections (New York: Doubleday, 2002), Peter Monge and Noshir Contractor, Theories of Communication Networks (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), and various pieces by Valdis Krebs posted since 9/11 on his website at ⟨www.orgnet.com⟩.

 8. From Valdis Krebs and June Holley, ‘Building Sustainable Communities Through Network Building,’ 2002, at http://www.orgnet.com/Buildingnetworks.pdf

 9. See Kathleen M. Carley, Jeffrey Reminga and Natasha Kanmeva, ‘Destabilizing Terrorist Networks,’ NAACSOS conference proceedings, Pittsburgh, PA, 2003, posted at ⟨http://www.casos.ece.cmu.edu/casos_working_paper/Carley-NAACSOS-03.pdf⟩.

10. Japan agreed to send only humanitarian forces, while a few central European countries agreed to send troops trained to cope with the consequences of chemical and biological attack. The Poles eventually sent a small combat contingent of several hundred soldiers, and in February 2004 South Korea agreed to send 3,000 troops principally to help with reconstruction. Before the war broke out, France also promised to send combat forces if the Iraqis resorted to the use of weapons of mass destruction – which never happened, but which would have decisively shifted the narrative aspect of the conflict back to one of being a ‘fight for civilization’.

11. For a sporting source of this principle see David Ronfeldt, ‘Social Science at 190 MPH on NASCAR's Biggest Superspeedways’, First Monday (February 2000), online only at ⟨http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_2/index.html⟩.

12. See Shanthi Kalathil and Taylor C. Boas, Open Networks, Closed Regimes: The Impact of the Internet on Authoritarian Rule (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2003).

13. On the idea of progress and its millennialist aspects, see Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1994), and Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History (New York: The Free Press, 1997).

14. Sources include Roger Griffin, ed., Fascism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), and Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914–1945 (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), and Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004). On the prospect of ‘friendly fascism’ in advanced democratic societies, see Bertram Gross, Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1980).