Terror and Its Antidote

John Arquilla believes the key to fighting today’s battles is to use the network tactics of terrorists.

PHILIP ROSS

Photography by Ed Kashi

After years of lamenting his generals’ inability to “face the arithmetic” of a war of attrition, Abraham Lincoln found the right man in Ulysses S. Grant. General Grant’s victory over General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia established sheer power as the American way of war, and for generations the U.S. military would lumber off to battle, often after initial setbacks and lengthy regrouping, to win through logistical miracles and overwhelming firepower.

It was a model for the industrial age and long due for change, says John Arquilla, a professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, who holds a Ph.D. in international relations from Stanford University and is the author of a shelfload of books. Dr. Arquilla is perhaps the most influential military theorist alive: the recent campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq bear his fingerprints. He preaches an anti-Grant, information-age doctrine that sneers at hierarchy and the chain of command and elevates small groups of soldiers, looped into ad hoc networks by electronic intelligence grids, to the status of a strategic model that he terms “netwar.”

“The Industrial Revolution put mass on the battlefield, but the story now isn’t about mass, it’s about precision,” he says. “We’re able to take a small unit of special forces and give them the hitting power of a World War II tank army.” So, of course, can the country’s enemies, as al Qaeda demonstrated all too well on September 11th, 2001, when it attacked New York City and Washington, D.C.