After the ‘War on Terror’—how to maintain long-range terrorist deterrence

Abstract

The American withdrawal from Afghanistan scheduled for 2014 signals an end to the first phase of the global ‘War on Terror’. Once the War on Terror enters a less intensive phase, a revised approach to terrorist deterrence would be necessary. The future global War on Terror is indicated to be focused on intelligence operations, surgical strikes to attack terrorist groups, increased surveillance and interception of terrorist activity and finally deterrence. Traditional deterrence requires a mutual understanding of a common rationality and a mutual interest of survival between the parties. These conditions do not exist in deterring terrorists. This paper is focused on how to establish and maintain long-range terrorist deterrence after the War on Terror. If traditional deterrence is applied on terrorism, it tends to end up in a tit-for-tat game, strike when struck and countervalue targeting. Traditional deterrence does not work against groups that operate under a different rationale. Instead, deterrence could be directed to the first logical layer surrounding terrorist activity like criminal networks supplying resources paid for by cash or illicit drugs. If these layers are deterred, terrorists either are denied necessary means or are forced to take bolder and riskier approaches to acquire their means, exposing them to a far higher likelihood of detection and interception.

Keywords:

• austerity
• cyber forensics
• cyber warfare
• data mining
• deterrence
• forensics
• irrational actor
• terrorism
• terror funding
• War on Terror

Acknowledgements

This material is based in part upon work supported by The Air Force Office of Scientific Research under Award No. FA-9550-09-1-0468. We thank Dr Robert Herklotz for his support.