The Invulnerable Networked Insurgency
Armed Liberal at Winds of Change takes on what he describes as the myth of the invincible "networked insurgency". The futility of fighting al-Qaeda has often been compared to fighting the mythical Hydra and the capture or death of each al-Qaeda "high value target" in Iraq was discounted as being as futile as cutting off the head of the legendary Lernaean serpent since each severed head was immediately replaced by two more. And when the words "network" and "insurgency" are juxtaposed, the public automatically associates the vastness and power of the Internet, the world’s best known public network, with the traditional potency of insurgencies to create the nightmare image of an invulnerable al-Qaeda, at once omnipresent and invincible. Armed Liberal writes:
the notion that we can’t defeat a networked guerilla force (see John Robb) … has pretty well taken hold … there are many heads, and so you can’t decapitate such a network, the argument goes. And since every violent act against a member of the network damages the network, and simultaneously helps it heal (by, for example, recruiting others to join the network), the issue is the ratio between damage/healing, and the attacker risks facing an impossible task, since the more damage they do the network, the stronger it may get.
And those who are not persuaded by allusions to Greek mythology must surely be silenced by an appeal to mathematics. Network theory, so the public was sometimes told, demonstrates the near-impossibility of disrupting a network like the Internet and hence, al-Qaeda. And as practical proof of this assertion, examples like this, from a.popular primer on networks are cited to put the proposition beyond refutation.
Motivated by the DARPA proposal, in January 2000 we performed a series of computer experiments to test the Internet’s resilience to router failures. Starting from the best available Internet map, we removed randomly selected nodes from the network. Expecting a critical point, we gradually increased the number of removed nodes, waiting for the moment when the Internet would fall to pieces. To our great astonishment the network refused to break apart. We could remove as many as 80 percent of all nodes, and the remaining 20 percent still hung together, forming a tightly interlinked cluster. This finding agreed with the increasing realization that the Internet, unlike many other human, made systems, displays a high degree of robustness against router failures. Indeed, a University of Michigan-Ann Arbor study had found that at any moment hundreds of Internet routers malfunction. Despite these frequent and unavoidable breakdowns, users rarely notice significant disruptions of Internet services.
What further proof could one require? What further evidence of the futility of trying to fight al-Qaeda? And yet Armed Liberal wondered what could possibly account for the recent defeats of al-Qaeda in Iraq? How could the AP report that "the civilian death toll in Iraq fell to its lowest level in recent memory"? Could it really be true, as the McClatchy Newspapers claimed, that deaths from terrorism had fallen so low that gravediggers in Iraq were openly complaining of unemployment? How could the apparent defeats suffered by al-Qaeda be reconciled with the confident assurance that it was invincible, however many heads were lopped off; what refutation could be found to the argument that one could remove "randomly selected nodes from the network" … "as many as 80 percent of all nodes" and still have "the remaining 20 percent" hanging together?
The answer to the conundrum is found in a close reading of experiment. What it says is that networks like the Internet are highly resistant to the removal of "randomly selected nodes". It says nothing about how sensitive they are to attacks made non-randomly on highly connected nodes. Winds of Change notes that the same primer on networks describes a totally different result when an experimental attack is made on highly connected nodes on the Internet. This time the network doesn’t shrug it off; it degrades rapidly.
Mimicking the actions of a cracker … we removed the largest hub, followed by the next largest, and so on. The consequences of our attack were evident. The removal of the first hub did not break the system, because the rest of the hubs were still able to hold the network together. After the removal of several hubs, however, the effect of the disruptions was clear. Large chunks of nodes were falling off the network, becoming disconnected from the main cluster. As we pushed further, removing even more hubs, we witnessed the network’s spectacular collapse. The critical point, conspicuously absent under failures, suddenly reemerged when the net¬¨ work was attacked. The removal of a few hubs broke the Internet into tiny, hopelessly isolated pieces.
But the careful reader would have noticed that neither the "proof" of a network’s vulnerability to the removal of key nodes nor the "proof" of invincibility against random attack necessarily applies to al-Qaeda. Winds of Change could be right in saying that "it’s possible to degrade and the destroy the effectiveness of networked insurgencies" — that attacking high value targets can actually degrade al-Qaeda; but the conclusion does not necessarily follow from the simple analogy to the Internet. In order to show the analysis works, it is necessary to show that the analysis applies. We must ask ourselves in what way the Internet might resemble al-Qaeda — and why a mode of attack applied to the one might apply to the other. If we could convince ourselves of that, then the analogies presented by Armed Liberal at Winds of Change would be more persuasive.
The place to begin is with the structure of al-Qaeda itself. Al-Qaeda’s cellular structure is a classic example of what is called a Small World Network. .That’s a fancy term to describe an organization where most members know only their immediate neighbors (or cell members) but can reach any other cluster of members by sending messages over a number of "hops" through members who are super-connected — that is members of more than one cell. The link-men make it possible for any given member to reach another through a very small number of "hops", typically less than six. That’s why it’s called a Small World Network.. We call these super-connected members "hubs". The diagram below represents this situation. It’s clear from the diagram that random members can communicate with the wider organization only through members who belong to two or more cells. With them they can communicate efficiently. Without the link-men they are cut off.
It is the existence of these link-men (or "nodes") with a high-degree of connectivity that allows a network to expand indefinitely. Without these super-connected nodes communication becomes impractical for a network of a large size. The reason the Internet is scale-free is because it contains a hierarchy of hubs through which a message can find its way. And the speed with which it can find the hub is invariant with respect to size. Another example of the same type is the air-travel network. It’s possible to fly to any part of the globe with relatively few connections precisely because of the existence of hubs. Without hubs communications and air-travel become very tedious. Both the Internet and the air-travel system, gigantic though they are, exhibit the properties of a Small World Network because they have nodes which have a high degree of connectivity. Although it is dissimilar in almost everything from the Internet and the air-travel system, al-Qaeda network architecture resembles them in that it shares this crucial property. It might theoretically be possible for al-Qaeda to redesign itself through a supreme effort of will into a random network in which no node is better connected than any other but the cost would be severe. Osama Bin Laden could communicate with his underlings only through a large number of steps in process similar to the game of Telephone or Chinese Whispers and receive a reply only in the same way.
In a network with the Small World property the removal of random nodes will hardly affect its operation. For example, there are a vast number of nodes on the Internet and thousands of airports throughout the world and striking one chosen by lottery will probably only damage something trivial. The odds a blow will land on a vital spot purely by chance are remote. An attacker without a detailed knowledge of the system is unlikely to stumble on a critical node purely by accident. Random attacks would probably be futile. But if that attacker understood precisely how the system worked the effect would be very different. Those directed attacks would be devastating. It would be as if an attack were mounted on the Internet Domain Name Servers or O’Hare Airport were shut down. The same applies to attacks on al-Qaeda’s hubs. It is the similarity between the structures of the Internet and al-Qaeda that make Armed Liberal’s arguments so persuasive.
That analysis shows what types of attacks are likely to be effective and which are probably going to be ineffectual. It suggests that Al-Qaeda will be highly resistant to random damage. Dropping a JDAM on the average Iraqi, Afghan, Saudi or Pakistani walking down the street is unlikely to produce no operational effect on al-Qaeda whatsoever. But dropping JDAMs on a high value target with key contacts and knowledge can be very disruptive. This explains why intelligence and working in partnership with allied Muslims is so important in fighting a networked insurgency. It explains why General Petraeus has so been effective. By working with Muslims, by "getting into the nodes" is it possible to identify the critical hubs. You can see the network from the inside. Then by taking down the critical hubs is it possible to rapidly degrade al-Qaeda. And by degrading al-Qaeda the effectiveness of its terror operations to intimidate a population into submission correspondingly declines. That’s why the partnerships with grassroots communities that the Coalition has formed in Iraq have been so effective. The Iraqis, in partnership with the Coalition have been identifying the hubs. In return the US has used its matchless kinetic warfare assets to take down the hubs. Taken together the partnership between political work and intelligence gathering on the one hand, and targeted attacks on the other hand, have proved very devastating against al-Qaeda. And that’s why there’s a slump in the graveyard business in Iraq.
The next installment of this two part series will describe several other interesting implications of al-Qaeda’s network structure that Armed Liberal did not address.
Richard Fernandez is PJM Sydney editor; he also writes at the Belmont Club.
Great article. Very informative. I don’t have the expertise to know whether this is a correct analysis or not but it ‘seems’ to be on the money and certainly reflects the obvious results on the ground
The size of the network is finite as well. OBL’s strong horse thesis is now working against him. You might be able to sell martyrdom in some glorious cause, but exercises in futility are a different matter.
This is an interesting article — but wouldn’t it be more accurate to describe al Qaeda as a sub-net within a much larger and diffuse network of Islamic Jihad?
This discussion implies that our fight is with al Qaeda alone, and not the much larger Islamic Jihad which nearly the entire Muslim world is waging against everyone else.
As such, truly “highly connected nodes” of Islamic fascism such as those which comprise Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, UAE, et al remain virtually unaffected by our “war” against the spreading nazism of Islam. Those ‘nodes’ have remained able, and will continue to be able to cough up boatloads of cash, boatloads of fresh young murderers, boatloads of coordinators, financiers, intelligence gatherers, and boatloads of terror-trained “imams” to fuel the doctrine of Islamic war worldwide. Even now they are building mosques across our ‘infidel’ homelands to spread the network (and the fight) to every corner of our world — yet we continue to behave as if they aren’t central to this fight, and as if those nests of Islamic hatred are off limits for our battle.
Until these toxic and dense Islamic super-networks are utterly degraded or destroyed, there will be no end in sight for the war we’re fighting, and no end to the poisons they will spew into our society.
It’s amazing that fully 6 years after 9/11, aside from Iran, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, those most affluent and influential Islamic hyena dens remain intact and nearly unobstructed in their ongoing schemes of violence, conquest, Jihad, and the spread of the vile Islamic disease. We still send piles of aid in the form of intelligence, dollars, military equipment, and boots on the ground to prop up these terror funding regimes… They are described as “allies” in the war — but they are epicenters of network of global Islamic fascism, central to the flourishing of EVERY Jihad outfit from Hizbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Muslim Brotherhood, C.A.I.R., al Qaida, MAS, ISNA, Jumaat Islamiya, PKK, etc. & etc…
How much good does it do to wipe out only one of the more virulent sub-nets when all the others are thriving and growing at unprecedented rates?
If we take this in concert with the typical pyramid structure of terrorist/insurgency groups, with the leaders at the top, the officers and agents just below them, the active support population below that, and the passive population serving as the base, we can begin to see the strategy for identifying those nodes. One must simply wear away the base. If the agents and leaders have no sea of other fish with which to swim in (as Mao may have put it), then they are left clearly in the open to pick apart.
We cannot simply bomb villages while hoping for minimal casualties on what may or may not be a high value target. This appears to me to be the strategy of randomly attacking the nodes, producing the hydra effect. However, by working with the passive population and convincing the active support population to work with you, then you have much more high-value intelligence on high-value targets.
Why would they want to do this, though? They certainly need a good reason to help cooperate, especially the second tier.
A network like Al Qaeda is ever-changing in an evolutionary sort of way. Given space to operate, it can develop in any way that it sees fit to its maximum benefit. Before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it had propagated to great effect around the Muslim world. Remember how high Osama bin Laden’s approval rating was?…
However, by reacting against this network, you are forcing it to change in ways that are not entirely under its control. By forcing it to react in certain ways, you can perhaps control the network’s evolution toward one of accomplishing its own self-destruction.
With Osama bin Laden in hiding and incommunicado, the network was forced to evolve in a new direction, one with more chaos and fluidity. In this confusion, Al Qaeda killed thousands of the same Muslims that it claimed to represent and fight for, actions that were inherently self-contradictory to the organization’s goals and very reasons for having support and existing. And now it is no wonder that support for Al Qaeda has whithered away, leaving exposed the tier 2 fighters and tier 1 leadership.
Re: SA, Egypt, other nominal Arab allies as enabling nodes.
Are less than they appear, I suspect, and more like the ignorant and at times criminal Americans that funded the IRA – i.e. it is not those nation’s policy, and as these oligarchs and worse discover an AQ cell (and their subjects funding same) they don’t have our qualms about eliminating them (consider the fall in the number of attacks in SA..).
Granted, SA funds many of the wahabi madrasses – where if the school master is inclined to identify and recruit the natural occurence of near-insane and suicide prone teens (say 1% of 1%) this will yield tens of thousands of human bomb candidates a year across the entire Islamic community. The good news is without training (camps in Afghanistan, Sudan, etc.) they mostly die before use, and an aggressive recruiter is easy to identify (a “connecting” node). And better news, the 30,000 to 60,000 soldiers that came through the AQ/Taliban/Horn-of-Africa training camps are now at least half gone, and now that we’re looking, running a training camp is a risky and life-ending business.
An untrained fighter is soon a dead fighter. Attrition can and does work. Sadly it takes time and sacrifice (of our loved ones in the field and money we’d rather invest elsewhere at home).
Ari Tai — “SA funds many of the wahabi madrasses” — I think that’s MOST or ALL Wahhabi indoctrination centers — thousands of them right here on American soil. I’ve just heard the statistic that SA pays for 80% of all Mosque mortgages in America — and this will spawn an endless and growing stream of Muslim fascists in our midst. So this remains a super network we’re doing nothing to destroy, and everything to enable.
Do we wait until they begin demanding Sharia rules in their conquered burgs, neighborhoods and towns, or withdraw from our Union in order to self rule under Islamic law? For as alarmist as this may sound — this is what they’re thinking of doing. It’s already happening, drip by drip.
While such scenarios may seem absurd and overheated now — thousands of Mosques paid for by radical Islam sprouting up all over America like so many poisonous mushrooms would have sounded like a preposterous suggestion even 20 years ago…
Why would or should any sane nation or community of people tolerate it? Just to accommodate the tiny minority of moderates? These so-called “radical” mosques will provide a steady stream of murderous Jihadis in perpetuity.
While it may be true that the training of these Muslim murderers will not be top drawer for many or most — in the end does such a distinction matter when you factor in the periodically spectacular atrocity such as 9/11 — or worse — the confluence of WMD in the hands of these Muslims – which is an inevitability if they’re not completely stopped. Even in the hands of the most inept Muslim maniacs tens of thousands or millions of us will die in their heinous Jihad.
This cost is just too high to accept.
It’s long been said “amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics”. For terrorist networks, substitute “finance” for “logistics”.
It’s finance that allows certain pro-Jihad elements to control mosques and madrasses. It was being a financial conduit between wealthy money man and the operational people that made Osama so powerful. Identify and terminate the financial people, and the Global Jihad will be crippled.
The above is easy to say, but hard to gather the will to do, since so many of the money men are prominent within their societies, and taking action against them will have political consequences. The short term political consequences, however, are dwarfed by the long-term consequences of allowing the money-men to continue
Great article. I agree with Morton Doodslag that our generational fight is with the global Islamic jihad and Al Qaeda is just one piece. More attention needs to be given to the Balkans where we have been on the wrong side thanks to Clinton
re: shutting down churches and schools (and other private organs of civil society), irrespective of who is funding them and the ideas (or agitprop) they may push.
Not a good idea. Western ideas and ideals will stand on their own merits. If a community chooses to adopt a given set of values and there’s no coercion, who are we to judge that, say, the Quaker or Shaker (or Methodist or Catholic) behaviors are acceptable on their own property or in their own home – and the Sharia is not?
What we need not tolerate is the recruiting and training of those that have been incited to violence. Of any faith, inward-looking (man) or outward-looking (god).
What we need not, should not, will not abide is coercion (at least after the age of majority).
Sadly we already have a long history of bowing to the politically correct and the elite’s definition and enforcement of same.
The Saudi’s funding of what they believe is education with religious overtones for what they believe is the salvation of all who choose to hear their god’s message is not the problem. Any group should be allowed to pursue their own vision of salvation to the extent that it remains non-violent, persuasive and non-coercive.
Anything less is not “The American Way.”
“the Quaker or Shaker (or Methodist or Catholic) behaviors are acceptable ”
because…
1. They don’t mandate the killing of apostates…
2. They don’t wreak heinous and barbaric punishments upon criminals, nor do they seek to subvert and replace the laws of the U.S. Constitution with an insane 7th century tribal code of intolerance, hatred, and revenge.
3. They don’t pose, never have posed, and never will pose the dangers of terrorist recruitment and terrorist incitement that Islam and Sharia CLEARLY do…
4. They don’t allow, cannot allow, and never will allow insane Muslim practices like female mitilation, arranged marriages or marriages of children as young as six (as Muhammad did), consummation of such marriages as young as nine (as Muhammad did and which Sharia allows therefore) because they are utterly subject to and accept their subjection to the manmade laws of the Constitution of the United States
5. They do not preach the supremacy of their religious laws over any and all man-made laws — nor do they seek to subvert destroy and subjugate those selfsame laws under the triumphal sway of their laws (as Islam and Sharia DO)…
6. The manmade laws of the West emerged in part from the Christian understanding of Man’s place in the Universe, his Free Will, and his right to choose certain things as his conscience allows unlike Islam and Sharia which provide that Man must subject himself to the Will of Allah — and live by the precepts of Islam as laid down 1400 years ago in the immutable texts of the Koran, and according to the execrable life of Islam’s prophet Muhammad.
7. They do not declare, nor is it enshrined in their cosmologies the notion that their duty is to subjugate the world under the “Quaker or Shaker (or Methodist or Catholic) behaviors” as Islam does, nor do their practitioners scheme and dream about bringing this about as Muslims do…
Islam and Sharia are utterly antithetical to everything enshrined in our secular man-made laws… To suggest otherwise is either extremely naive, or extremely sinister of the poster above.
As you might have heard, DARPA has announced a network challenge in the vein of the DARPA grand challenge https://networkchallenge.darpa.mil/.
In this challenge, participants are tasked with finding 10 red weather balloons distributed throughout the continental US for 8 hours on December 5. The idea is to get this to be a crowdsourcing kind of activity, where people will use social media tools to solve this problem.
Our group, the MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team at http://balloon.mit.edu/bloggers, based out of the MIT Media Lab, has created a system where you get money not just for finding balloons, but for getting people to join the hunt who find the balloons, or for getting people who get people who find balloons, etc. Here’s an image of the structure:
First you have to sign up, which you can do here. Then you can send invitations to others to join through your own unique URL, crediting you with recruiting them.
While our team is interested in winning the contest, we are also interested in studying information diffusion in social networks. Does Twitter spread information faster than blogs? Is your blog effective at spreading information?
Once you sign up, you can track you impact using a link such as
http://balloon.mit.edu/YOUR_USERNAME/followers
and you can spread your influence using a link such as
http://balloon.mit.edu/YOUR_USERNAME/
We could use your help in getting out the word. If you sign up and blog about us you will be able to see the impact that your blog has on getting out the word in real time.
Win money, help science, and help charity!
Kind regards,
The MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team