Information OperationsNewsletter

Compiled by: Mr. Jeff Harley

US Army Strategic CommandG39, Information Operations Branch

Table of Contents

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The articles and information appearing herein are intended for educational and non-commercial purposes to promote discussion of research in the public interest. The views, opinions, and/or findings and recommendations contained in this summary are those of the original authors and should not be construed as an official position, policy, or decision of the United States Government, U.S. Department of the Army, or U.S. Army Strategic Command.

Table of ContentsVol. 8, no. 07 (1-17 January 2008)

1. Analysis: U.S. Lost Fallujah's Info War

2. Enemies at the Firewall

3. The Dogs of Web War

4. War -- or Crime -- in Cyberspace (editorial)

5. Al Qaeda Taps Cell Phone Downloads

6. Bosnian Jihad Groups Mark Analyst For Attacks

7. An Information Operations Approach to Counter Suicide Bomber Recruiting

8. US Looks To Military to Take on Cyber Threats

9. Intel Brief: Chinese Cyberwarfare

10. Millions Able To Receive Hizbullah TV

11. Unlikely GI Wins Hearts in Iraq

12. Where War and Porn Collide

13. Abu Yahya’s Six Easy Steps for Defeating al-Qaeda

14. Decoding the Virtual Dragon

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Analysis: U.S. Lost Fallujah's Info WarBy Shaun Waterman, UPI, 2 Jan 08WASHINGTON, Jan. 2 (UPI) -- A secret intelligence assessment of the first battle of Fallujah shows the U.S. military believes it lost control over information about what was happening in the town, leading to political pressure that ended its April 2004 offensive with control being handed to Sunni insurgents."The outcome of a purely military contest in Fallujah was always a foregone conclusion -- coalition victory," reads the assessment, prepared by analysts at the U.S. Army's National Ground Intelligence Center. "But Fallujah was not simply a military action, it was a political and informational battle. … The effects of media coverage, enemy information operations, and the fragility of the political environment conspired to force a halt to U.S. military operations," concludes the assessment.It adds that the decision to order an immediate assault on Fallujah, in response to the televised killing of four contractors from the private military firm Blackwater, effectively prevented the Marine Expeditionary Force charged with retaking the town from carrying out "shaping operations," like clearing civilians from the area, which would have improved their chances of success."The very short time allowed for shaping operations before the fight resulted in a battlefield full of civilians," observes the assessment, prepared in March 2006 and classified secret. A copy was posted on the Web last week by the organization Wikileaks, which aims to provide a secure way whistle-blowers can "reveal unethical behavior in their governments and corporations" and says it favors government transparency.Although a spokesman for U.S. Army intelligence declined to comment on the document, United Press International independently confirmed its veracity.The assessment says a daytime curfew and ban on all public gatherings imposed by Marines in the town was "difficult to enforce" and that insurgents exploited U.S. adherence to the laws of war and sometimes-restrictive rules of engagement. As a result, "non-combatants provided cover for insurgents, restrained (the) employment of combat power, and provided emotional fodder for Arab media to exploit."The authors say that media were "crucial to building political pressure to halt military operations" from the Iraqi government and the Coalition Provisional Authority, which resulted in a "unilateral cease-fire" by U.S. forces on April 9, after just five days of combat operations.During the negotiations that followed, top Bush administration officials demanded a solution that would not require the Marines to retake the town, according to the assessment."The American National Command Authority pressed for other options besides finishing the clearing of Fallujah," it states. "Given few options," coalition forces on April 30 formally turned over control of the town to the so-called Fallujah brigade -- essentially the same insurgents they had just been fighting.Crucial to this failure, the authors believe, was the role of the Arabic satellite news channels al-Jazeera and al-Arabiyah.An al-Jazeera crew was in Fallujah during the first week of April 2004, when the Marines began their assault on the town of 285,000 people."They filmed scenes of dead babies from the hospital, presumably killed by coalition airstrikes," complains the assessment. "Comparisons were made to the Palestinian intifada. Children were shown bespattered with blood; mothers were shown screaming and mourning day after day."The two stations "focused almost exclusively" on the theme that the military was using excessive force, reports the assessment, saying their coverage was "increasingly … shrill in tone," and they both "appeared willing to take even the most baseless claims as fact."

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Worse, al-Jazeera crews were the only source of pictures of the conflict, because the town was too dangerous for Western news organizations, which were "forced to pool video shot by Arab cameramen.""The absence of Western media in Fallujah allowed the insurgents greater control of information coming out of Fallujah," concludes the assessment, because their charges "could not be countered by Western reporters because they did not have access to the battlefield."As examples it cites the ultimately unsubstantiated allegation that cluster bombs were used by U.S. forces and the "false allegations of up to 600 dead and 1,000 wounded civilians" -- although 600 actually tallies with estimates by the Iraq Body Count, a Web site that tabulates reports of civilian casualties and has been cited by President Bush.By contrast, the assessment states that, later in 2004, when U.S.-led forces successfully retook Fallujah, they brought with them 91 embedded reporters representing 60 media outlets, including Arabic ones."False allegations of non-combatant casualties were made by Arab media in both campaigns, but in the second case embedded Western reporters offered a rebuttal," the authors state.The assessment added that the coincidence of the Shiite uprising in southern Iraq on April 2 and the publication of pictures of abuse by U.S. forces in Abu Ghraib later that month "further enflamed a politically precarious situation and could not have happened at a worse time.""Insurgents sometimes get lucky," the authors conclude. A "nascent and weak" Iraqi government had "offered no political cover for U.S. commanders to finish the operation in a reasonable time period," and "without domestic Iraqi political support, offensive operations were halted."Table of Contents

Enemies at the FirewallBy Simon Elegant, Time Magazine, 6 Dec 07Tan Dailin lets out an audible gasp when he is told that he was identified in the U.S. as someone who may have been responsible for recent security breaches at the Pentagon. "Will the FBI send special agents out to arrest me?" he asks. Much as they might want to talk with him, though, FBI agents don't have jurisdiction in Chengdu, the capital of China's Sichuan province, where Tan lives. And given that he has been lauded in China's official press for his triumphs in military-sponsored hacking competitions, Tan is unlikely to have problems with local law enforcement. But Tan and his seven companions, who make up the self-proclaimed Network Crack Program Hacker (NCPH) group, are taking no chances. A couple of weeks after they spoke to TIME, they shuttered the group's website, on which they used to proudly post specially designed hacking programs that could be downloaded for free. Visitors now find only a notice that the page is being redesigned.Tan and his fellow hackers may be lying low for now. But the controversy over the activities of hundreds of Chinese like them will only continue to grow. Though the evidence remains mostly circumstantial, a picture is emerging of a coordinated effort by Chinese-military authorities to recruit hackers such as Tan and his group to winkle out information from computer systems outside China and launch cyberattacks in future conflicts.China has long regarded cyberwarfare as a critical component of asymmetrical warfare in any future conflict with the U.S. From China's perspective, it makes sense to use any means possible to counter America's huge technological advantage. A current wave of hacking attacks seems to be aimed mainly at collecting information and probing defenses, but in a real cyberwar, a successful attack would target computer-dependent infrastructure, such as banking and power generation. "Can one nation deliver a crippling blow to another through cyberspace?" asks American Sami Saydjari, head of the private computer-security group Cyber Defense Agency and former president of Professionals for Cyber Defense. "The answer is a definite yes. The Chinese know we are much more dependent on technology, and the more you depend on it, the more vulnerable you are."Hacking attacks from the Middle Kingdom aren't new. In 1999, after U.S. planes bombed Beijing's embassy in Belgrade, and again in 2001, when a Chinese fighter crashed after a collision with a U.S.

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surveillance plane, Chinese hackers conducted cyberbattles with their U.S. counterparts. For several years beginning in 2003, U.S. government servers were subjected to a coordinated series of hacker attacks, code-named Titan Rain, which officials said had originated in China.The scale and sophistication of the activities apparently conducted by Tan and his group--and their alleged ties to the People's Liberation Army (PLA)--are an insight into China's effort to establish a corps of civilian cyberwarriors. A recent series of intrusions into the systems of Western governments and major corporations was blamed on China (though none of the intrusions have been specifically tied to Tan and his group). This month British media reported that the country's top antiespionage official had sent a letter to 300 major corporations warning that they faced attacks from "Chinese state organizations." In May computers in the office of German Chancellor Angela Merkel were compromised by programs that had originated in China. In June U.S. military officials said an attack from China had penetrated a computer system at the Pentagon--though nonclassified, it included a server used by the office of Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Beijing denies that it is behind hacker attacks. Jiang Yu, a spokesman for China's Foreign Ministry, described such reports as "wild accusations" and said they reflected a "cold war mentality."Outside China, however, the worries continue. "Recent events have made Western governments very nervous that this is just the tip of the iceberg," says Saydjari. "[The Chinese] have launched the equivalent of a Sputnik in cyberspace, and the U.S. and other countries are scrambling to catch up."Meet the Geek BrigadeGathered around the table at a restaurant in Chengdu on a recent evening, Tan, a.k.a. Withered Rose, and seven other members of the NCPH workshop don't look as though they could bring the U.S. economy to a halt. All in their early 20s, rail thin and with the prison pallor acquired from long nights spent hunched over monitors, they look like what they are: a bunch of nerds. They refuse to give their real names, referring to one another by nicknames--Blacksmith, Firestarter, Fisherman, Floorsweeper, Chef, Plumber, Pharmacist. All vehemently deny having anything to do with attacks on U.S. government systems. "Messing with the U.S. Department of Defense is no small thing," says Floorsweeper. "We read about arrested terrorists, about Guantánamo. Who gets away with messing with the U.S. government?"O.K., so what does the NCPH, which Tan founded in 2004 when he was a student at Sichuan University of Science and Engineering, actually do? The answer starts out vague, but eventually pride gets the better of the young men. They acknowledge that the group first got its reputation by hacking 40% of the hacker associations' websites in China. That was during their "young and hotheaded college days," as Fisherman puts it. The NCPH is also famous for the remote-network-control programs they wrote and offered for download. These programs, which allow hackers to take over other computers, are exactly the kind that were used to obtain documents, spreadsheets and other materials from U.S. government offices in the most recent attacks.But according to two detailed studies by iDefense, a branch of VeriSign, an Internet-security company based in Mountain View, Calif., the NCPH created 35 programs that took advantage of vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office to implant so-called Trojans--programs that take partial control of an infected computer and can be used to send documents, spreadsheets and other files over the Internet. The two iDefense reports say that beginning in May 2006, the Chengdu group "launched a barrage of attacks against multiple U.S. government agencies ... The result of all of this activity is that the NCPH group siphoned thousands--if not millions--of unclassified U.S. government documents back to China." Citing evidence of Tan's close ties to the military and other Chinese hackers' organizations that have been suspected of acting on behalf of the military, the reports conclude that Tan and the NCPH were almost certainly acting on behalf of and funded by the Chinese armed forces. "Most likely," the reports suggest, "hundreds of these groups exist in China." Tan declined to comment on the studies.In response to questions from TIME, a faxed letter from China's State Council Information Office said accusations that the PLA was involved in hacker attacks against overseas targets were "groundless, irresponsible and also have ulterior motives." The Chinese police, the letter said, had received no requests from overseas governments asking for investigations of Chinese attacks on their websites.

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But reports in Chinese newspapers suggest that the establishment of a cybermilitia is well under way. In recent years, for example, the military has engaged in nationwide recruiting campaigns to try to discover the nation's most talented hackers. The campaigns are conducted through competitions that feature large cash prizes, with the PLA advertising the challenges in local newspapers.Tan is a successful graduate of this system. He earned $4,000 in prize money from hacker competitions, enough to make him worthy of a glowing profile in Sichuan University's campus newspaper. Tan told the paper that he was at his happiest "when he succeeds in gaining control of a server" and described a highly organized selection and training process that aspiring cybermilitiamen (no cyberwomen, apparently) undertake. The story details the links between the hackers and the military. "On July 25, 2005," it said, "Sichuan Military Command Communication Department located [Tan] through personal information published online and instructed him to participate in the network attack/defense training organized by the provincial military command, in preparation for the coming Chengdu Military Command Network Attack/Defense Competition in September." (The State Council Information Office didn't respond to questions about Tan, and China's Foreign Ministry denies knowing about him.)With the help of experts from Sichuan University, the story continued, Tan's team won the competition and then had a month of intense training organized by the provincial military command, simulating attacks, designing hacking tools and drafting network-infiltration strategies. Tan was then chosen to represent the Sichuan Military Command in competition with other provinces. His team won again, after which, the iDefense reports say, he founded the NCPH and acquired an unidentified benefactor ("most likely the PLA") to subsidize the group's activities to the tune of $271 a month.It's not what you would expect from a bunch of guys drinking beer (lots of it) in the back room of a hotpot restaurant in Chengdu. Suggest that they might hack for cash, and the NCPH crew is outraged. "The real hackers are not doing it for a name or money," says Fisherman, who sports a small diamond-stud earring. "The real hackers keep their heads down, finding network loopholes, write killer programs and live off social security."Spoken like some grungy geek from Seattle. Except that in China, apparently, the definition of social security might include a stipend from the army.Table of Contents

The Dogs of Web WarBy Rebecca Grant, Air Force Magazine, January 2008After years of claims and counterclaims concerning the severity of national security threats in cyberspace, the picture is at last starting to become clear. Recent jousting within cyberspace has provided clues about what to expect from combat in this new domain. For example, China has been positively identified as a source of “campaign-style” cyber attacks on Department of Defense systems. Russia, moreover, is the prime suspect in last spring’s notorious cyber assault on Estonia.Outside the military realm, too, cyber attacks are forming a persistent threat to aerospace enterprises and other parts of the US industrial base.More than ever before, cyberspace is on the minds of America’s top leaders. Air Force Gen. Kevin P. Chilton, the new head of US Strategic Command, said during his confirmation hearing that “attacks impacting our freedom to operate in space and cyberspace pose serious strategic threats.”Defending the nation from cyberspace attacks is STRATCOM’s mission—but one of the big challenges is assessing the strategic threat and demarcating lines of response.It all begins with knowing the adversary. China is at the top of most lists of nations with advanced cyber capability—and the will to use it.Because of the overall tenor of military competition with China, every report of Chinese activity raises hackles. In fact, there’s been a steady level of reported skirmishing in cyberspace this decade.

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Tactic No. 1 is near-constant pressure on US government systems. The goal of these attacks is to breach systems and leave behind malicious code capable of redirecting network activity or enabling access to stored data—to change it or steal it. “Cyber is all about ‘protect it or steal it,'" Lt. Gen. Robert J. Elder Jr., commander of 8th Air Force and USAF’s point man on cyber issues, said last year.Sometimes cyber attacks take place during more traditional crises. In April 2001, the Chinese were preparing a hacker onslaught during the tense period when a US Navy EP-3 crew was held after making an emergency landing following a midair brush with a Chinese fighter. The FBI cautioned network operators in government and commercial sectors to keep up their guard.Sure enough, in May 2001, Chinese hackers took down the White House Web site for almost three hours with a denial-of-service strike. Since then, the attacks originating from servers in China have grown in sophistication and intensity.In 2003, a barrage of attacks from China hit Pentagon systems. The incursions were notable enough to get their own temporary code name, Titan Rain.In February 2007, officials at Naval Network Warfare Command acknowledged that Chinese attacks had reached the level of a campaign-style, force-on-force engagement, according to Federal Computer Week.Then, last April 26, came the first full-blown cyber assault resembling an act of war. A controversy over moving a bronze statue of a Russian soldier from the center of Tallinn, capital of Estonia, ended with a massive, coordinated assault on Estonia’s cyber institutions. Many Web sites, both commercial and government, were shut down for days in the highly wired society.Cyber FingerprintsUnavailable, however, was firm attribution of who was responsible for the attack on the tiny NATO ally. Some of the cyber fingerprints suggested Russian involvement, but the nature of cyber attacks made the origin hard to verify. Russia officially denied involvement, noting that Russian computers could have easily been used by hackers worldwide.“Estonia was kind of a wake-up call,” said Marine Corps Gen. James E. Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and previous head of STRATCOM. “We’ve got to make sure we have situation awareness at a scale commensurate with our equities.”All doubt about Chinese culpability in these sorts of attacks vanished shortly after Russia’s likely assault on Estonia. Pentagon sources acknowledged that a Chinese attack broke into an unclassified e-mail system used by the Office of the Secretary of Defense in June 2007. As reported by the Financial Times, the Pentagon attributed the attacks not only to Chinese server locations but to the People’s Liberation Army itself.President Bush addressed the issue in some depth after the reports, saying, “A lot of our systems are vulnerable to cyber attack from a variety of places.” The first question planners should ask should be “what are you doing to defend America against cyber attack? ... Are you then providing expertise and technology necessary to defend?”Bush’s remarks seemed to indicate more than a passing interest in the topic. “We understand that we’re vulnerable in some systems—some, by the way, more valuable than others,” he concluded.Air Force Lt. Gen. Daniel P. Leaf, deputy commander at US Pacific Command, told the Washington Times in November 2007 that computer attacks were a growing problem. “We’re very concerned about that—for the information that may be contained on [the networks] or for the activities we conduct that are command and control and situation awareness related,” he said.The attacks are of interest not for their fleeting effects—but for what they suggest about adversary intent, evolving capabilities, and the potential for debilitating breaches.“China has put a lot of resources into this business,” said Elder. Communist China’s public doctrine calls for dominating the five domains of air, land, sea, space, and the electromagnetic spectrum. Although “they’re the only nation that’s been quite that blatant,” Elder said, “they’re not our only peer adversary.”Chinese cyber attacks also have a second goal: industrial espionage, with attempts made to access corporate databases. That tactic has been around 20 years or more, since early users of the

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Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPAnet) first noticed Soviet operatives logging into the network from overseas sites to trawl file directories of the university and think-tank nodes.China’s attacks were not unlike the so-called Moonlight Maze incursions emanating from Russia. In the late 1990s, a band of Russian hackers was alleged to have stolen research and development secrets from commercial and government sites in the US and resold them.Targeted e-mail attacks have become more and more alluring. In late 2006 and 2007, a common technique was to e-mail false news updates, such as one attack that offered news on a missile shootdown in Iraq.On Aug. 21, 2007, e-mail attacks originating in China targeted 28 defense contractor sites in the United States. In this case, defense contractors were tempted with an attachment purporting to discuss engine modifications for the Pioneer unmanned aerial vehicle.According to the FBI, the e-mail text contained an actual presentation that had embedded a malicious code known as “Poison Ivy.”The FBI soon traced the attack to Internet Protocol address 218.106.252.77—which turned out to belong to CNC Group-BJ, CNC Group Beijing Province Network.While the FBI reported that this intrusion was not successful, experts still shook their heads at the rapid morphing of these offshore probes.All of this is creating a level of frustration. As Cartwright characterized it, “The probing of our networks, day in, day out, has gotten to a point where it’s so egregious it actually cries and demands that we take some kind of action.”The first priority for the Pentagon is to protect the sophisticated suite of warfighting capabilities provided by the Air Force. Much of that depends directly on cyberspace.“When we talk about cyber defense, we’re not just talking about trying to fit some kind of better virus protection on a computer,” said Elder. “We’re talking about protecting this ability to do these interdependent joint operations.”By this definition, cyberspace is at the heart of expeditionary and global operations. “You have to realize we can go to any part of the world and we can start doing operations immediately because we can stand up the communications, the command and control systems, situation awareness systems, that we need to be able to do that,” he explained.Elder predicted that American (and, specifically, Air Force) capabilities will step up, and in fact, they already have. An important distinction is that the cyber realm is not just the Internet—it is the use of the electromagnetic spectrum. In this realm, battles are waging constantly. “This is not something we will do next year or the year after that,” said Elder. “This is stuff we’re doing now.”He noted last fall that ongoing cyber missions include defeating remotely triggered IEDs in Iraq, conducting electronic warfare operations, halting terrorist use of the Global Positioning System and satellite communications, and preventing jamming.“We have peer competitors right now in terms of dealing with computer network attacks through computer network exploitation,” Elder said. He also let it be known that the US—and specifically, USAF—was committed to dominance in cyberspace. “I believe that we’re going to be able to ratchet up our capability,” he said, by harnessing the intellect and the technological might of the nation. “We’re going to go way ahead.”The Air Force has recently taken bold action in this regard. In 2005, it elevated cyberspace to a level on par with air and space, when cyberspace was added to USAF’s mission statement.Rules of EngagementElder himself oversaw the service’s cyberwar capabilities during the time when the mission was being reinforced by the creation of a new Cyber Command, the Air Force’s 10th major command.A larger policy problem rests with calibrating cyberspace operations to a scale of legitimate action. Over the last decade, rules of engagement for kinetic military operations—like targeting a terrorist safehouse in Iraq—have become highly refined.

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Theater-level rules of engagement, collateral damage estimation, and positive identification all must be observed before any strike takes place. Rules such as these keep responses proportionate to the political-military goals of an operation. It’s a framework familiar to the hundreds of thousands of US troops operating around the world today.With cyberspace operations, that framework is not so prominent. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said recently that China “must respect a set of game rules.”But what are those rules, and what constitutes a breach? Connecting cyberspace activities to the geographical norms of international politics is no easy task.For centuries, most international law has depended on the concept of sovereign borders and sovereign rights of states to gauge legitimacy. Everything from the Geneva Convention to the law of armed conflict is predicated on most offenses taking place between—or within—sovereign states. Rules of war also take for granted that events occur at a physical location tracing back to a nation-state.It is easy to tell when a state is using tanks or artillery against its neighbors or its own populace. With cyber attacks, it’s unclear when and whether the state is involved.Tracing attacks back to the originating Internet service provider does yield a physical location. (Cyberspace is projected from a physical infrastructure of servers, routers, and computers that have definite and sovereign physical locations.) However, cyberspace exists in a domain deemed independent of the nation-state.What’s harder to establish is whether people conducting the attacks are hackers working on their own or at a government’s behest. If a computer remotely “occupied” by hackers traces a physical location to China, that is not necessarily evidence that China is behind the scheme. The ambiguity works both ways, however. If China is behind an attack, it has built-in deniability.A Fundamental Question“In this environment it’s just very difficult to tell the point of origin,” said Cartwright. “The source of the activity can be widely separated. Al Qaeda can live on a US ISP and execute from someplace else. How do we handle that?”It boils down to a fundamental question: When does an attack in cyberspace become a de jure attack? Even in the case of Estonia, protected by NATO’s collective defense principle, the proper response to last spring’s attack was open to debate.“If a bank or an airport is hit by a missile, it is easy to say that is an act of war,” said Madis Mikko, a spokesman for the Estonian defense ministry. “But if the same result is caused by a cyber attack, what do you call that?”The problem applies not only to state vs. state cyber conflict but to the persistent intrusions into business networks. Cartwright noted that “most law is generated in property, and [cyberspace] doesn’t tend to respect property in the same way.”Still undefined is the proper role for the US military. Inside the United States, legal precedent and direction limits what the military can do. According to Cartwright, “If it’s inside the US, if we’re to do anything about it, it’s got to be on dot.mil” for the military to act. Most classified military networks are self-contained and rarely subject to the same barrage of attacks carried via the Internet.“If it’s outside that and they want the military to do anything about it, then its military support to civil authorities just like we would do with a hurricane or anything else,” he explained.In fact, it’s the Department of Homeland Security that houses the key response teams for responding to Internet attack.Already, however, Cartwright hinted at a greater freedom of action in the cyberspace commons. “Once you leave our shores, then the military authorities start to be present, and what we do is layer the defenses out as best we can to get the most warning, situation awareness that we can to protect our interests,” he said.Given the constant probing, investing in survivability is a big priority. The cyber balance of power is “the most dynamic world we’ve ever seen,” said a senior STRATCOM official. Software security fixes may just last for hours.

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Expect to see an impact on Air Force budgets as service leaders fund the new mission. “What we’re trying to do in ’08 and ’09 is to accelerate the programs that are tied to survivability of the Air Force portion of the global information grid,” Elder said.The new Cyber Command will focus dedicated attention to the problem. Elder and others are working to lay the foundation for a cyberspace career path in the Air Force on a par with those for weapons systems and specialties. “We’re looking to set up a professional cadre of cyber operators, and this would be enlisted and officer,” Elder said.Investing now in survivability should help keep down the costs of buying new technology. A prime system is the Combat Information Transport System Block 30. “This is a system that is reducing our exposure to the commercial Internet,” said Elder. “It’s providing us much greater situational awareness in terms of being able to track the traffic on our networks.”Serious money is going to the effort. “Some things we’re trying to do with the CITS Block 30, for example, are in the range of half a billion dollars,” Elder said.Investment will fund software tools to track vulnerabilities “before the hackers find them,” said Elder, and insulate them with database wrappers that create portals to block incursions. The Air Force is also investing in extensive database encryption—a proven technique. “It’s just much more difficult for someone to fool with your system when the data’s encrypted,” Elder said.Yet it may take an increased sense of strategic threat to force clarification of the cyberspace mission.Currently, there are classic divides. The intelligence community uses cyberspace in its tradecraft. Yet there is growing demand for operators to be able to exploit the same turf.Also yet to be determined is how much traction the Air Force is getting with its commitment to cyberspace.Creating EffectsMany acknowledge the current US cyberspace strategy is “dysfunctional”—to use Cartwright’s term from when he headed STRATCOM. But there’s been only tepid enthusiasm for the Air Force’s willingness to step up to the growing mission. Ultimately, the Air Force may be recognized as the chief force provider for cyber capabilities. Signs suggest it won’t come without a period of debate.That debate will center first on the logic of cyberspace as a domain. To Air Force planners, the domain aspects have become self-evident. Cyberspace operations include activity to maintain the freedom to attack and freedom from attack in that domain. In fact, counterdomain operations are being defined, too.As Elder put it, “The better your cyber is, the [more] quickly you can do decision-making, [to] create effects.” Degrading and slowing operations—especially to the point where “you can’t operate anymore”—creates what Elder termed a “counterdomain effect.”Not all accept cyberspace as a clear-cut domain like air, space, or the sea, however. Cartwright, for one, pointed out that it all turns in part on whether cyberspace is to be treated as a truly separate and co-equal area of warfare. “That’s the huge debate,” he said. “Should this be a domain or not be a domain?”Even as the pace of activity escalates, there’s a sense of proceeding carefully. Part of the concern rests with a reluctance to lock in poor solutions.Cartwright urged senior leaders to recognize how much there is to learn from the younger generation. “The Joint Staff is an old staff, demographically,” he said. “So here we are, in charge of thinking our way through cyber without the 20-somethings.”He warned against putting in place a rigid doctrine for cyberspace that might end up squashing the creative thinking that has always been a hallmark of the domain.“If we try to use our industrial-age Napoleonic decision structures, are we disadvantaging ourselves?” asked Cartwright. He saw “a lot of cultural issues that far outreach the technical issues and the organizational constructs. What I’m most concerned about is protecting the decision space and the opportunity space of the 20-somethings.”

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Then there is the issue of service roles and missions. Cartwright will watch to see how the services invested in cyberspace and follow the dollars as a way of monitoring their commitment. He said he would take particular notice if a service stopped investing somewhere to increase cash for cyberspace. “If service X says I’m giving up this class of toys, for cyber, it will be very telling about their risk equation,” he said.But he stopped well short of handing over the cyber mantle to the Air Force. “Where we are right now, each of the services has found value,” Cartwright said. The Air Force is making investments and letting its money “speak about their risk equations. We’ve got enough time to let that play out.”Table of Contents

War -- or Crime -- in Cyberspace (editorial)By Austin Bay, Townhall.com, January 2, 2008In the computer age -- and 2008 is definitely in the computer age -- the difference between an act of war and crime is often a matter of interpretation as well as degree. Attack a nation's highways and railroads, and you've attacked transportation infrastructure. You've also committed an obvious, recognized act of war. An electronic attack doesn't leave craters or bleeding human casualties, at least not in the same overt sense of an assault with artillery and bombs. However, the economic costs can be much larger than a classic barrage or bombing campaign. Cyberspace has become a much busier and more dangerous place in the last 15 years. Today, entire nations rely on computer networks for communications, economic transfers and information storage. Computers and computer networks are lucrative targets for criminals. This increased economic and information reliance means that in the 21st century targeting a nation's electronic infrastructure is an act of war. Bankers know this. So do intelligence agencies. Diplomats and political leaders must also come to grips with that reality. Everyone with a personal computer understands the basic concepts of cyber warfare. Link your laptop to the Internet, and you link to the great collective of the Information Age. You also connect to a digital disease pool populated by viruses that instantly erase electronic brains. That means data is destroyed -- perhaps less messily, but as thoroughly, as an attack with a high-explosive bomb. You also enter a world where even trusted Websites may leave a "tracking cookie" on your own computer so they can know something about your Internet shopping preferences. There are, however, even more aggressive programs that allow "inquisitive geeks" to follow everything you read and write. These cyber "spyware" programs are a form of cyber spy war. Add more sophisticated digital trickery and additional levels of penetration wizardry, and programs like these could steal secrets from embassies and defense facilities. Spies and soldiers know cyber attacks aren't new and that institutional computer systems, even large, ostensibly well-protected one like those used by banks, big businesses and government agencies, are also vulnerable. In the early 1990s, a senior National Security Agency staffer told me that individual hackers were constantly trying to penetrate "various government networks." He did not elaborate -- any elaboration would have quickly involved classified material -- but he said NSA analysts had "learned a lot watching these people." Those are cryptic words from a cryptologist in the days when computer-savvy 14 year olds were tapping into their parents' bank accounts. In late April of this year, the world got a look at the economic and psychological effects of a "massed" cyber attack -- a sophisticated, sustained and coordinated "hack" of an entire country. Estonia was the victim. Estonia is a "wired society." The country has made Internet access an economic and political priority. Over a period of weeks (April through mid-May), Estonia suffered from what The Washington Post described as "massive and coordinated cyber attacks on Websites of the government, banks, telecommunications companies, Internet service providers and news organizations."

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Bank accounts were "probed," email services shut down. Estonia's minister of defense called the attacks "organized attacks on basic modern infrastructures." According to press reports, Estonia claimed that the attacks originated at the Internet addresses of "state agencies in Russia." Russia denied the charge, attributing the attacks to criminals and vandals. There is no doubt that the Internet is rife with criminal activity. On Sept. 5, 2007, StrategyPage.com called China "Computer Crime Central." The StrategyPage report focused on "poisoned Websites" that try to steal financial data (like bank account login information). StrategyPage argued that some Internet criminal activity appeared to link to "attacks on Western military and government networks." Those attacks certainly occur. On Sept. 3, the Financial Times reported that China's military had hacked "a Pentagon computer network" in June 2007. That followed reports that Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel had complained about Chinese hacking of German computer systems to China's premier. A criminal act or an act of war? Until 9-11, the U.S. government treated terror as a criminal-type activity to be confronted with a robust law enforcement effort. That approach, however, proved inadequate.Table of Contents

Al Qaeda Taps Cell Phone DownloadsFrom the Associated Press via CNN, 6 Jan 07CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- Al Qaeda video messages of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri can now be downloaded to cell phones, the terror network announced as part of its attempts to extend its influence.The announcement was posted late Friday by al Qaeda's media wing, al-Sahab, on Web sites commonly used by Islamic militants. As of Saturday, eight previously recorded videos were made available including a recent tribute to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the former al Qaeda in Iraq leader killed by U.S. forces in Iraq in June 2006."The elite jihadi media group presents the first batch of al-Sahab videos to be downloaded to cell phones," the announcement said.Ben Venzke, the head of IntelCenter, a U.S. group that monitors and analyzes militant messages, said it was not the first time al-Sahab has released videos designed for cell phones.He said the group has been releasing them for years, but that between September and December, a few video messages did not come with versions for cell phones."They might just be filling in some of the gaps, or just trying to release some that had come out before," Venzke said in an e-mail to The Associated Press.In a written message introducing the new cell phone videos, al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda's No. 2 figure, asked followers to spread the terror group's messages."I asked God for the men of jihadi media to spread the message of Islam and monotheism to the world and spread real awareness to the people of the nations," al-Zawahiri said.Videos playable on cell phones are increasingly popular in the Middle East. The files are transferred from phone to phone using Bluetooth or infrared wireless technology.Clips showing former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's execution in December 2006 showed up on cell phones soon after his death. In Egypt, images showing police brutality have been passed around via cell phones including one video that showed an arrested bus driver being sodomized with a stick by police in the fall 2006.Video and audio tapes from various Islamist groups including al Qaeda are available on militant Web sites but require a computer and a fast Internet connection -- often rare in the region -- to download.

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But the eight videos currently available to download to cell phones by al-Sahab range in size from 17 megabytes to 120 megabytes, requiring phones to have large amounts of free data capacity. Al-Sahab has promised to release more of its previous video messages in cell-phone quality formats.The terror network has been growing more sophisticated in targeting international audiences. Videos are always subtitled in English, and messages this year from bin Laden and al-Zawahiri focusing on Pakistan and Afghanistan have been dubbed in the local languages, Urdu and Pashtu.In December, al Qaeda invited journalists to send questions to al-Zawahiri. The invitation was the first time the media-savvy al Qaeda offered outsiders to "interview" one of its leaders since the September 11, 2001, attacks.Table of Contents

Bosnian Jihad Groups Mark Analyst For Attacks From SERBIANNA, January 4, 2008 The Al-Qaeda Media Committee, once led by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and used to coordinate the attacks on September 11, is now targeting Western intellectuals, experts, professors and analysts that expose Islamic terror activities, says Ilan Weinglass, Editor of the Terror Financing Blog, a website whose panel of experts have given expert testimony to the US Congress. The latest target in these synchronized attacks of cyber-jihad is Professor Darko Trifunovic from the Faculty of Security Studies at the University of Belgrade. "It became clear that al-Qaeda's committee now targets our intellectuals, experts, professors etc...recently there has been an ongoing Internet War against Dr Darko Trifunovic, from the Faculty of Security Studies, University of Belgrade, who discovered existence of 'White Al Qaeda' in Bosnia and Herzegovina," writes Weinglass. Although its center of gravity is Pakistan, the Al-Qaeda Media Committee has an elaborate media network all over the world, including Bosnia and Kosovo, and is using the media network to target intellectuals that expose Islamic terror activities and thus impede on al-Qaeda's operations. "The Media Committee coordinates with the owners of pro-fundamentalist media and activists inside major media outlets to spread Islamic fundamentalist propaganda. The basic function of this Committee is to justify the activities of Islamic fundamentalists. The main weapon is to claim that Muslims are always and everywhere the exclusive victims of violence," says Weinglass. Current "cyber-pogrom" of Dr. Trifunovic by a network of Bosnian Muslim media sites includes tactics such as smear attacks and outright denial of any Bosnian Muslim links to al-Qaeda all laced with claims of Muslim victimhood. Congress of North American Bosniaks, a group claiming to be an "umbrella" organization that allegedly represents over 350,000 Bosnian Muslims in North America, initiated the attacks on Dr. Trifunovic with a letter to the President of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, demanding that the organizers of the 11th European Police Congress ban Dr. Trifunovic from taking part at this year's meeting to be held in February 2008 in Berlin. "Being such hate monger and denier of aggression and genocide, culturocide, ecocide, ethnocide, urbicide and elitocide, his place is," claims Emir Ramic, President of the Congress of North American Bosniaks "behind the bars, and not on the same podium with European Commission Vice President and Commissioner for Justice, Freedom and Security, Franco Frattini." Besides broad ridicule of his expertise, Bosnian Muslim attacks on Dr. Trifunovic, an ethnic Serb, focus on his ethnicity and claim that all ethnic Serbs are genetically programmed for fascism and terrorism. "It has to be openly stated that this 'expert', Dr. Darko Trifunovic, belongs to the Serbocide people who in their genes carry fascism and terrorism," writes Esad Krcic for the Bosnian Muslim internet media Bosnjaci.net. Writing in the mainstream Bosnian Muslim media outlet in Sarajevo, a columnist for Dnevni Avaz, Almasa Hadžic, questions Bosnian Muslim involvement in international Islamic terrorism and claims

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that no serious terror analyst takes Dr. Trifunovic's thesis about "white al-Qaeda", the Islamic terrorists with European features, seriously. "It is correct that the way in which Trifunovic communicates his excrement to the public few serious in the world, especially in the circles that scientifically deal with the questions of terrorism, today experience as a contribution to the global fight against this plague," writes Hadžic in Dnevni Avaz. However, recently leaked Western intelligence reports indicate that Muslim-dominated regions in Bosnia are rich ground for recruiting the so-called "white al-Qaeda" – Muslims with Western features who could blend into European or U.S. cities and carry out terror attacks. "The 'white al-Qaeda' certainly can find fertile ground in the region," a Western diplomat, who asked not to be named, told the Associated Press about terror predisposition of Bosnia and the Muslim separatist region of Kosovo. "One of the main objectives of the Islamic fundamentalists’ global network is to create a perception in the world public opinion that Muslims are always the victims, in order to justify conflict and conquest," says Weinglass. Bosniak American Advisory Council for Bosnia and Herzegovina, a Bosnian Muslim group that seeks to be "political and educational voice" for Bosnian Muslims in the US, has recently issued an appeal to the public to support the recently introduced congressional resolution, H. RES. 679, which claims that there are "continuing effects of the genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina." The sponsor of this Resolution 679, Representative Chris Smith of New Jersey, says that he recently met with the Bosnian Muslim President Haris Silajdzic, who was also a Bosnian Muslim leader in the 1990s during which time his government issued passports to al-Qaeda operatives by the thousands. Few days ago, Sarajevo-based paper SAN has reported that two al-Qaeda members, Hamad Nail Daidashi and Muhamed Dumi Masudi, that have recently been killed in Iraq by the US troops had Bosnian Muslim passports on them. Representative Smith says that Silajdzic is "a Bosnian leader I have known and deeply respected since the early 90s." In his Congressional testimony to the Banking Committee on terror finance, Jean-Charles Brisard points that, in 2002, a secret al-Qaeda document, the Golden Chain, was uncovered in Bosnia that listed the top 20 Saudi financial sponsors of al-Qaida. The Bosnian document also mentions the Muslim World League that was offering the use of its bureaus "so the 'attacks' will be launched from 'league' (Muslim World League) offices." After a meeting with Representative Chris Smith in Washington, Dr. Mustafa Ceric, the Reis-ul-Ulema or the spiritual leader of Bosnian Muslims, took part in the meeting with the representatives of the Muslim World League in Mecca. Representative Smith describes Mustafa Ceric as an "inspiring man of God and internationally recognized as a man of peace and extraordinary compassion--and a friend." John Schindler, Professor of Strategy at the Naval War College and a former intelligence officer at the National Security Agency in charge of intelligence gathering and analysis of the Bosnian conflict, says that the Bosnian Jihad is a template for future al-Qaida operations in all of the Balkans, including Kosovo, and that al-Qaeda considers Bosnia one of its top-three victories they have achieved in the world thanks in large part to the successful application of information operations (IO) as a core element of that strategy. "The importance of IO has been regularly underestimated by the enemies of al-Qaida, and those who hope to defeat the jihad in the Balkans and elsewhere must learn to match the enemy's formidable capabilities in this arena," says Schindler. Ilan Weinglass says that attacks on Dr. Trifunovic are nothing new in the way al-Qaeda deals with analysts that significantly impede the operational structure of the Islamic terror network. "Many terrorism researchers have received explicit or implicit threats from Muslim organizations. People like Steve Emerson of the Investigative Project, Rita Katz, Matt Levitt have all received

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threats of some kind. I think Steve Emerson always has a few death threats against him and lives (or lived) under police protection," says Weinglass.Table of Contents

An Information Operations Approach to Counter Suicide Bomber Recruiting

By Lieutenant Colonel William S. Rabena, USAWC Strategy Research Project, 15 Mar 2006 The views expressed in this student academic research paper are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

ABSTRACT Information Operations (IO) is one of today’s least understood, yet most common scapegoat for

perceived Global War on Terrorism failures in Iraq. Despite the on-going efforts of strategists and commanders to leverage the media in an attempt to tell the “good news” successes in Iraq, news coverage continually gravitates towards act of violence, especially suicide bombings. With or without media support, recent polls indicate that the Coalition already won many of the “hearts and minds” of the Iraqi people. Yet, most of the success or failure of information operations is measured and stuck on telling only the “hearts and minds” story.

The analysis from this study suggests that IO correctly shoulders blame for all the wrong reasons. More appropriately, IO is underutilized in what can be deemed a “kinetic-only” battle on the suicide bomber. This project proposes an information operations policy expansion in relatively unused supporting elements – counterdeception and counterpropaganda. This will add a non-kinetic approach to the kinetic-centric fight on suicide bombers. The study will analyze how information operations, in the form of counterdeception and counterpropaganda, can target the recruiting base for suicide bombers. More specifically, the project explores the possible success that could be achieved when counterpropaganda and counterdeception address cognitive third order effects of those who are most influential to the potential suicide bomber’s decision-making. This new approach targets the Sunni religious faction and the family. This departure from current information operations norms serves as a change to current strategy. The recommended strategy changes are also included in the study. An Information Operations Approach To Counter Suicide Bomber Recruiting

O ye who believe! The idolaters only are unclean. …And the Jews say: Ezra is the son of Allah, and the Christians say: The Messiah is the son of Allah. That is their saying with their mouths. They imitate the saying of those who disbelieved of old. Allah (Himself) fighteth against them. How perverse are they?

Qur’an (147/9:28-30)1 Despite the United States’ measured progress to rebuild Iraq and win the Global War on

Terrorism, recent Gallup Polls indicate national support is waning. In fact, a daily Gallup Poll conducted on 11 November 2005 illustrated the declining public support when it reported the following: 77% of the American populace on 24 March 2003 felt the American role in the war in Iraq was the right thing to do, only 52% on 16 April 2004 felt the same way, and a mere 38% on 11 November 2005 felt the effort was not a mistake.2 Often blamed is the conduct of Information Operations (IO). The inability to captivate the attention and support of the American public, as well as influence world opinion, appears directly proportional to the print and television media agenda. After all, news coverage rarely substitutes a success story for the sensationalism of a suicide bombing. Death tolls dominate the media while progress in Iraqi municipal infrastructure reconstruction, increased government stability, a growing number of Iraqi security forces, and even more telling – the overwhelming Iraqi support for coalition assistance – remain stories less told. This, compounded with the military being the only advertised element of national power, indicates that pundits who blame the government’s inability to wage strategic communications may have gotten it partially correct. However, there is danger in being correct for the wrong reasons. To make this clear, it is important to discuss information operations: what they are doing well and what they are not doing well, before discussing what they can do – but are not.

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Information Operations: Right Scapegoat, Wrong Reason Information Operations shoulder too much blame for the perceived failure to wage a successful

Global War on Terrorism in Iraq. A closer examination of U.S. information operations illustrates why IO is one of today’s least understood, most underutilized, and also most common scapegoats for perceived failure in Iraq. Field Manual 3-13 defines IO as:

the employment of the core capabilities of electronic warfare, computer network operations, psychological operations, military deception, and operations security, in concert with specified supporting and related capabilities, to affect or defend information and information systems, and influence decision-making.3

A common mistake often made by those who fault IO is the over-emphasis placed on the media and civil-military operations (CMO). Although vital, CMO and the media are not among the listed core capabilities in the above definition. They are merely related activities of IO. More specifically, FM 3-13 defines the supporting elements of IO as physical destruction, information assurance, physical security, counterintelligence, counterdeception, and counterpropaganda. IO’s related activities are public affairs and CMO.4 An enormous degree of energy is spent on these two non-core elements. Yet, despite the on-going efforts of strategists and commanders to leverage the media in an attempt to tell the “good news” successes in Iraq, news coverage continually gravitates towards the violence. A strong argument can easily be made that the Coalition won the harder to win “hearts and minds” of the Iraqi people through CMO and PAO coverage, but cannot convince the American people of the same successes. Even more perplexing is the high probability that this fight to wrestle media attention away from the suicide bomber is a losing battle that may continue, only to potentially exhaust the Coalition.

Surprisingly, the reaction of the Iraqi people during the liberation indicates the Coalition won their “hearts and minds” without the media, and the media coverage of suicide bomber aftermath appears to not impress the American public. A September 2005 Gallup Poll article entitled “Support for U.S. Policy in Iraq is Dwindling,” attempted, but failed to explain why. The article suggested “the sudden and sharp decline in public support for the Bush administration’s Iraq policy seen in the latest poll,”5 was unrelated to the rise in suicide bombings:

The September 16-18 poll came on the heels of what was described as the deadliest day of attacks in Baghdad since the invasion of March 2003. Last Wednesday, a dozen or so suicide bombings and other attacks claimed the lives of more than 150 civilians and security personnel, only to be followed by more bombings and more than 30 killed on Thursday. 6

The 12-15 September Gallup Poll results, which “spanned the period of Baghdad attacks, found no drop in the percentage of Americans saying it was worth going to war with Iraq.”7 Hence, although public affairs is a necessary non-core information operations element, the tiresome and losing media grind of “carrots for sticks” may have falsely deemed information operations a failure in Iraq. This indicates two phenomena. First, the media’s ability to rapidly sway public opinion may be overrated. Second, the unbalanced efforts to leverage the media at the expense of other elements of information operations may be misplaced. Rather than exhaust information operations focused on convincing the media to tell “good new stories” and diverting attention away from suicide bombings, other IO options designed to have a more direct impact on defusing the suicide bombers’ success should be explored.

Perhaps a more suitable reason for the information operations failure label is the lack of production from the IO supporting elements. In particular, counterdeception and counterpropaganda are underutilized in what can be deemed a “kinetic-only” battle on the suicide bomber. This research project proposes a policy expansion in information operations where counterpropaganda and counterdeception can add non-kinetic approaches to the kinetic-centric fight on suicide bombers by targeting the recruiting base. More specifically, this project explores the possible success that could be achieved when counter-propaganda and counterdeception address cognitive third order effects of those who are most influential to the potential suicide bomber’s decision-making. The new approach targets the Sunni religious faction and the family, and this departure from current information operations norms requires changes to current national strategy.

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National Strategy Shortfalls The February 2003 National Strategy for Combating Terrorism is, at first glance, a very moving

document that refines National Security Strategy global terrorism guidance. The nexus between both strategies and their global influence on other nation-states to follow suit is very clear. Nation-state and regional responses to the American-spearheaded United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1373 indicate that a common global effort to combat terrorism, in both word and, in some cases, deed, exists. The common thread woven into each strategy is a heavy reliance on law enforcement and the military element of national power to combat terrorism as a short term fix; whereas, diplomatic, intelligence, finance, and economic elements primarily target long-term counterterrorism objectives. Three other commonalities exist. The first is that information as an element of national power is barely mentioned. The second commonality found is that each document provides a very weak attempt to address terrorist recruiting. Finally, the third commonality is that there is no distinction made between the types of terrorism the U.S. faces. As a result, there is no tailored response for countering suicide bombers motivated by Islamic fanaticism. Not surprisingly, global successes and failures closely mirror the efforts outlined in printed strategy. The military and legal agencies report they are successfully winning a global battle of attrition with kinetic operations; tighter border and visa control measures render terrorist movement more difficult; intelligence is much more globally shared; finance freezing and procedures to counter money laundering are rendering significant set-backs to global terrorism movements.

Unfortunately, lack of progress is due to what is missing in each of the documents listed above. Today, suicide bombers motivated primarily by a distorted version of Islam are easily recruited. They capture world media attention by leveraging media crews who are more focused on sensationalism than on reporting progress. Information operations are often blamed, but the lack of focused guidance in the National Strategy for Combating Terrorism should share the blame. The National Strategy for Combating Terrorism’s long-term overarching focus needs a proactive, short-term complement that targets suicide bomber recruits. The National Military Strategic Plan for the War on Terrorism (NMSP-WOT), dated 1 February 2006, is a vast improvement, but it still falls short. On the positive side, the new strategy does a better job defining the enemy and briefly mentions information operations, counterpropaganda, computer network operations (CNO) and recruitment. The new strategy does not separately address what it takes to counter suicide bombers, and similar to the NSCT, it is long-term focused. In an effort to propose recommendations for a more comprehensive written strategy, it is important to explore the motivation behind the most effective brand of terrorism faced today.

The National Strategy for Combating Terrorism (NSCT) and the National Security Strategy (NSS) are clearly nested. In the NSS, Section III, entitled Strengthen Alliances to Defeat Global Terrorism and Work to Prevent Attacks Against US and Our Friends, provides the guidance, priorities and focus for the NSCT. Shortcomings in the NSCT stem from the guidance outlined in the NSS. The first shortcoming is the all-encompassing approach to terrorism: “The enemy is not a single political regime or person or religion or ideology. The enemy is terrorism – premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against innocents.”8 While it is admirable and not without merit to include all types of terrorism, the lack of guidelines specifically dedicated towards the nation’s religiously motivated terrorist threats suggests that a “one size fits all” counterterrorism plan will work. This demonstrates a lack of understanding or unwillingness to address the specific motives for each brand of terrorist. The motivation for religious terrorism is distinctly different than secular based terrorism and therefore effective countermeasures for one will not necessarily be effective for the other.

Perhaps the most significant oversight of both the NSS and the NSCT is the omission of recruiting as a priority. The NSS states, “Our priority will be to disrupt and destroy terrorist organizations of global reach and attack their leadership; command, control and communications; material support; and finances. This will have a disabling effect upon the terrorists’ ability to plan and operate.”9 The priorities did not mention terrorist recruitment; consequently, the NSCT followed suit. The NSCT barely mentions recruitment. There is one small entry in support of the objective “Locate terrorists and their organizations;” however, it funnels the sole responsibility to the Intelligence Community. “The Intelligence Community will continue its comprehensive effort to acquire new reporting

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sources, then use those sources to penetrate designated terrorist organizations to provide information on leadership, plans , …, and recruitment.”10 The fact that the NSCT’s only substantial mention of countering recruitment is a passive intelligence collection process undermines the massive responsibility inherent with recruitment counterpropaganda. The Intelligence Community is not equipped to counter recruitment propaganda, and to suggest counterpropaganda is unnecessary indicates the strategy is reactive at best.

One of the more robust elements of strategy nested in the NSS and NSCT is the initiative to target money, freeze assets, and stop money laundering. Great detail and emphasis is placed on finance as an element of national power. The emphasis is laced throughout both documents. Not surprisingly, and unlike recruitment, great strides have been taken both nationally and globally to locate and stop terrorist financing. While this is certainly a very important counterterrorism tactic, the price of a suicide attack can be relatively inexpensive when the reward is an exaggerated view of “paradise in the afterlife.” The Sources of Islamic Revolutionary Conduct highlights the significant “promise of an immediate entry into paradise for the martyrs of jihad” 11 that guarantees “honor, adoration, and physical pleasures.”12 Certainly, this costs nothing for the financier to resource; however, “families of jihadis often receive financial and material rewards such as better housing.”13 These particular funds appeared to have escaped the strategists’ scrutiny. The NSCT is not averse to targeting individuals, stating, “The United States and its partners will target the individuals, state sponsors, and transnational networks that enable terrorism to flourish.”14 Yet, the strategists who wrote the NSCT did not recognize the enormous contribution towards a recruiting counterpropaganda campaign had they advertised the forfeiture and recouping of funds paid to the families of martyrs. This certainly could make future suicide bombers, or at least their families, think twice. Aside from this missed opportunity, the strategy thoroughly attacks terrorist finances.

An analysis of United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1373 provides a litmus test of how U.S. strategy influences the United Nations and the European Union. In fact, the same strategic strengths and missed opportunities in recruitment resonate in UNSCR 1373. This particular resolution is mentioned numerous times in the NSCT. Like the U.S. strategy, it is anti-financier-centric, and very light in demanding measures to counter recruitment. The resolution is similar to the “you’re either with us or with the terrorists” U.S. policy regarding nation-states that allow terrorist activities to function within their borders. The strong stance is evident in the words, “…every State has the duty to refrain from organizing, instigating, assisting or participating in terrorist acts in another State or acquiescing in organized activities within its territory … .”15 UNSCR 1373, however, dedicated only one sentence to recruitment. Consequently, the responses from both the United States and European Union barely addressed recruitment. The lack of recruitment emphasis is found in the U.S. response to the probing questions asked by UNSCR 1373. Out of twenty-two pages, the response only dedicated three sentences to recruitment. Moreover, the U.S. countermeasures are strictly reactionary and after-the-fact. Recruiting for membership in a terrorist organization is merely grounds for deportation and loss of visa privileges.16 The European Union response to UNSCR 1373 regarding recruitment is even weaker. It simply does not answer the resolution’s question. On the other hand, the resolution resembles the NSCT’s strong opposition towards terrorist financing. The EU response is thorough and even speaks of targeting individuals for money. However, the same missed opportunity found in the NSCT regarding not specifically targeting the funds delivered to families of martyrs is a missed opportunity in UNSCR 1373 and in the EU response, as well. Finally, a seven page, July 2003 special report to the United Nations on Antiterrorism Assistance spoke volumes about drafting counterterrorism legislature, money laundering, and weapons trafficking, but never mentioned recruitment.17 This exposes the narrow focus of the NSCT regarding global counterterrorism, and vividly reveals the urgency for the United States to get it right by publishing a supplemental strategy. Missed U.S. strategic opportunities to counter recruitment are bound to be repeated elsewhere from nation-states following the U.S. lead.

The National Strategy on Combating Terrorism diffuses its intended direction because the countermeasures it proposes take a “one size of terrorism fits all” approach. Granted, the National Security Strategy must be written in general enough terms so that all options are covered; however, the NSCT needs the type of specificity that can direct the proper resources (means) towards sensible plans (ways) in order to achieve strategic goals (ends). As written, it fails to

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accomplish this. Moreover, by not making the distinction between secular and nonsecular terrorists (let alone suicide bombers), the strategy’s approach is too broad, and therefore under appreciates the motivational differences, as well as key differences in cultural, political, and technological factors. Clearly, it is no surprise that the United States is facing a terrorism predominately rooted in Islamic fanaticism:

The National Commission on Terrorism found that fanaticism rather than political interests is more often the motivation now, and that terrorists are more unrestrained than ever before in their methods. Other scholarly sources have reached similar conclusions. Terrorism is increasingly based on religious fanaticism.18

In light of this conclusion, the urgency for the NSCT and NMSP-WOT to address countermeasures tempered for the religious fanatic is readily apparent; however, not everyone agrees. Pape, in Dying to Win, reaches a somewhat different conclusion. He agrees that defeating campaigns of suicide terrorism should be the focal point of any U.S. strategy, but he defines American presence in Muslim regions, not Islamic fundamentalism, as the root cause of suicide terrorism directed against Americans.19 Pape suggests that spreading democracy and relying on regional democratic governments to reduce suicide terrorism will not work. His proposed blueprint for success resembles isolationism, where the U.S. is best served in a defensive posture with improved border control and visa standards; a complete withdrawal of American troops from the Gulf; long term energy independence with off-shore balancing to secure interests in the region; and limited military anti-al-Qaeda operations.20 The problem with his conclusion is that it turns a blind-eye towards al-Qaeda’s stated Caliphate objectives and assumes the United States has only to look within its own borders to satisfy vital interests. This suggestion underestimates the ideological goals of both radical and moderate Islamists; however, Pape does see a need to address suicide terrorists separately in any strategy.

Perhaps the most salient point that underscores the difference between secular terrorists and the type now facing the United States is motive. Matthew Morgan cites the following popular observations concerning the new brand of Islamic fanaticism facing the United States: “Earlier concerns about alienating people from supporting the cause are no longer important to many terrorist organizations. Rather than focusing on conventional goals of political or religious movements, today’s terrorists seek destruction and chaos as ends in themselves.”21 He goes on to say, ”For many violent and radical organizations, terror has evolved from being a means to an end, to becoming the end in itself.”22 The reason that this distinction is so important for the national strategy to address is that a terrorist who disassociates himself from the political goals will not be influenced by the current American propaganda outlined in the strategy. The current strategy takes a proactive stance in regard to freezing monetary assets and killing terrorists. However, information as an element of national power outlined in the strategy has no such proactive elements. The strategy focuses the information element of power on conveying American rhetoric. Stories of democratic processes, economic opportunities and enticing civil military projects are long-term talking points at best. Moreover, they will have no effect on a brand of terrorist who divorced himself from his own political goals, and substituted terror “from being a means to an end, to the end in itself.”23 This motivational difference between a secular and non-secular terrorist illustrates the IO disconnect in the National Strategy for Combating Terrorists . Information Operations is either misplaced or underutilized. Before proposing more appropriate IO measures for the militant Islamist, it would be prudent to further discuss why the current measures will not work.

Cultural differences are among the most vivid examples that underscore misdirected information operations as outlined in the national strategy. From the written strategy down to the commanders on the ground, winning an IO campaign replete with “good news stories” and wonderful free-democratic society rhetoric has been the focus. In addition, commanders often exhaust all measures to exploit media opportunities when terrorists indiscriminately kill innocent civilians. These approaches must be pursued, because they draw support from the intended IO targets – the local populations, the American public, and the international players. For cultural reasons, this type of strategy would potentially be very effective if leveraged against secular terrorists, who generally have pragmatic reservations 24 and “may view indiscriminate violence as immoral.”25 Morgan also highlights that “the goals of secular terrorists are much more attuned to public opinion, so

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senseless violence would be counterproductive to their cause, and hence not palatable to them.”26 This makes perfect sense as to why secular terrorists are more sensitive to the mainstream media. The current information operations initiatives either outlined or inferred from the National Strategy for Combating Terrorism would be well suited for secular terrorism; however, the same initiatives make little impact on today’s culturally different nonsecular terrorist. Morgan ably draws the cultural distinctions that allow us to see the flaws of the current strategy’s information operations direction. He notes that religious terrorists do not hold the same pragmatic reservations that secular terrorists do.27 He also highlights “indiscriminate violence may not be only morally justified, but constitute a righteous and necessary advancement of their religious cause.”28 Coupled with differences in how secular and nonsecular terrorist factions view their respective constituency base.29 This clearly points out why a “one size fits all” information operations approach will not work. In fact, contrary to those who argue that the non-secular based terrorist uses the media skillfully and heavily, “religious terrorists are often their own constituency, having no external audience for their acts of destruction.”30 With the exception of using the media as a recruitment tool and to instill fear, religious terrorists have little use for it and are not fazed by the American infatuation with winning the IO campaign. This all suggests that there must be better methods to devote information operations efforts against the type of terrorist facing the United States today.

In addition to the cultural dichotomy, secular and non-secular terrorists also view political and foreign policy appeasement very differently. Unfortunately, this is at the expense of a national strategy focused on a more secular-minded terrorist. One particular stated objective is to “Win the War of Ideas.” While this concept warrants long-term merit for thwarting terrorist support, particular portions are overly optimistic. For example, “We will continue assuring Muslims that American values are not at odds with Islam”31 and “The United States will work with such moderate and modern governments to reverse the spread of extremist ideology and those who seek to impose totalitarian ideologies on our Muslim allies and friends,”32 fall prey to the assumption that non-secular terrorists are moved by foreign policy adjustments and new ideologies. Bruce Hoffman, in Inside Terrorism, finds, “For the religious terrorist, violence is a divine duty…executed in direct response to some theological demand…and justified by scripture.”33 Morgan drew the conclusion shared by many that, “This reasoning makes political change or conventional political objectives irrelevant, and is consistent with observations that violence is itself the objective.”34 In light of Osama bin Laden’s fatwa, “to kill the Americans and their allies – civilians and military – is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it,”35 it becomes readily apparent that the same diplomatic attempts to alter foreign policy or apply political appeasement which might work with a secular terrorist with political goals will have no effect on Islamic radicals. Pape is somewhat, but not entirely at odds with this assertion. He argues that suicide bombings are on the rise, because “terrorist groups learn from one another”36 and history ably points to a fifty percent success rate of altering the political landscape or forcing negotiations.37 In particular, he cites terrorists achieving partial to full expectations of political or territorial goals, such as:

Hezbollah versus United States and France in 1982, …Hezbollah versus Israel, 1983-85; Hamas versus Israel, 1994, and Hamas versus Israel, 1994-95; in one case, the targeted government entered into sovereignty negotiations with the terrorists (LTTE versus Sri Lanka, 1993-94 and 2001); in one case, the terrorist organization’s top leader was released from prison (Hamas versus Israel, 1997).38

Pape, however, highlights limits to his findings. He theorized the suicide terrorist success rate to achieve political goals will be greatly reduced when their goals “compel target democracies to abandon goals central to national wealth or security.”39 There is an enormous difference between convincing the United States to withdraw Marines from Lebanon where no vital interests were at stake, compared to the interests at stake combating suicide bombers in the Global War on Terrorism. Placed in this context, Pape comes full circle with Morgan’s conclusions that radical Islamists may continue to attack without the hope of achieving political goals. This underscores the importance for any U.S. strategy to recognize the distinction. In fact, Steven Simon and David Benjamin noted:

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… that many al Qaeda attacks, including the major planning phase of the 9/11 attacks, took place during favorable times for the Palestinians in the Middle East peace process, and that no foreign policy changes by the U.S. government could possibly have appeased the bin Ladenist radical.40

Suicide Bombers are Rational Beings: Rationality is a Prerequisite for IO Targeting The foundation of any strategy that leverages information operations must assume the targeted

decision maker is accessible. When applied to the suicide bomber, this means the suicide bomber must be a rational thinker. Any chance for counterpropaganda and counterdeception to achieve third order cognitive effects relies on this assumption. Likewise, attempts to dissuade the support of those most influential to the potential suicide bomber hinges on those who support being rational, therefore accessible, targets. Without this assumption, policy writers, strategy makers, and commanders at operational and tactical levels are confined to traditional, kinetic-based, counter-suicide bomber operations. These approaches are problematic at best because of their reactive (versus proactive) nature. A proactive approach using information operations would require “getting into the head of the suicide bomber” before he chooses to commit; however, in order for the cognitive side of a target to be accessible, the target must first be rational. There are many who believe the suicide bomber is irrational. In response to:

the rising rate of suicide terrorism (even while the overall number of terrorist incidents were on the decline), U.S. Senator John Warner echoed the sentiments of many who observed this trend when he said: “Those who would commit suicide in their assaults on the free world are not rational and are not deterred by rational concepts.41

While the opinions of Senator Warner and those who agree with him are not necessarily those of scholarly authority, their opinions are certainly understandable. After all, psychopaths are clinically diagnosed irrational beings, and terrorist behavior has often been associated with psychopathological behavior. Pearce, in Police Negotiations, labeled the terrorist as “an aggressive psychopath, who has espoused some particular cause because extremist causes can provide an external focal point for all the things that have gone wrong in his life.”42 The argument for irrationality is even more compelling when the motives and behavior of Islamic suicide bombers, often justified by Koranic verses, are analyzed under the microscope of those motivated by Western democratic ideology, which is deeply rooted in traditional Christian-Judeo beliefs. Those who cling to the concept that the suicide bomber is irrational shackle the potential of information operations to affect the recruiting base. This is readily apparent in the National Security Strategy and National Strategy for Combating Terrorism , both of which emphasize the kinetic side, but lack a strong stance when addressing the use of information to deter suicide bomber recruitment.

Randy Borum, in his book Psychology of Terrorism, cites many studies that conclude that terrorists, and more importantly, suicide bombers are in fact very rational. On the topic of psychological and personality abnormality, Borum quotes several authorities:

Despite more than two decades of research and theoretical speculation attempting to identify what makes terrorists ‘different,’ perhaps the best documented generalization is negative: terrorists do not show any striking psychopathology (McCauley, 1989). In fact, Crenshaw (1981) argues that “the outstanding common characteristic of terrorists is their normality” (p. 390), and Silke (1998) has concluded that “most serious researchers in their field at least nominally agree with the position that terrorists are essentially normal individuals.43

Borum points to Friedland’s 1992 opinion to counter older studies. Friedland opines, “as for empirical support, to date there is no compelling evidence that terrorists are abnormal, insane, or match a unique personality type. In fact, there are some indications to the contrary.”44 In a 2002 scientific review, Charles Ruby concludes, “terrorists are not dysfunctional or pathological; rather, it suggests that terrorism is basically another form of politically motivated violence that is perpetuated by rational, lucid people who have valid motives.”45 With the exception of the concept “another form of politically motivated violence,”46 Ruby’s claim closely matches most contemporary findings. Finally, after Borum admitted that there are some characteristics that psychopaths and terrorists share, he proposed Cooper’s 1978 findings that highlight the core deficits that they do not share. In Psychopath as a Terrorist, Cooper draws a noticeable distinction between terrorist and

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psychopath behavior. He states, “Terrorism, like any other serious undertaking, requires dedication, perseverance, and a certain selflessness. These are the many qualities that are lacking in the psychopath.”47 The selflessness characteristic in a rational being will be discussed later as an exploitable trait that can be targeted with counterpropaganda.

The suicide bomber is a special breed of terrorist that may warrant a separate psychological study. There are two reasons for this. First of all, the suicide attack moved to the forefront as the method of choice. Prior to the sensationalized aftermath of recent Al-Qaeda sponsored suicide bombings, and as early as the 1980s, suicide attacks accounted for more deaths than any other method. As evidence, a 2001 State Department report, Patterns of Global Terrorism , concluded, “Even excluding the 9/11 attacks on America, in the span of two decades between 1980 and 2001, suicide attacks accounted for only 3% of all terrorist incidents, but they were responsible for 48% of the terrorism-related deaths.”48 Borum posited a few suggestions for the increased use of suicide bombings. He specifically highlighted the logistical and tactical advantages by emphasizing the low cost and unlikelihood of being captured or compromising the group’s security.49 Even more straightforward is Pape’s 2003 conclusion that, “the main reason that suicide terrorism is growing is that terrorists have learned that it works.”50 Certainly, the effective and increased use of suicide bombers warrant a separate psychological study. This justification is even more convincing when examined under the possibility that IO could be an effective counter if it only took concluding that the suicide bomber is a rational being.

The second reason warranting a separate psychological study is that suicide bombers represent a brand of terrorism that is even more difficult to label as rational for policy makers rooted in western democratic Christian-Judeo upbringings. Policy makers and strategy writers must bridge this gap and focus a more proactive information-based strategy on the recruiting hot-beds of rational suicide bombers. Once again, Borum’s argument that suicide bombers are rational is both contemporary and convincing. He successfully conveys the rationality argument by distinguishing the differences in mental processes between one who commits suicide and one who uses it as a form of violence to inflict massive casualties for a cause. Borum contends:

Existing research reveals a marked absence of major psychopathology among “would-be” suicide attackers; that the motivation and dynamics for choosing to engage in a suicide attack differ from those in the clinical phenomenon of suicide; and that there is a rational strategic logic to the use of suicide attack campaigns in asymmetric conflict.51

Dr. Silke in a 2003 report adds that the “personalities of suicide bombers are usually quite stable and unremarkable (at least within their own cultural context).”52 However, Borum’s more compelling points focus on the differences between the suicide bomber and the person clinically diagnosed for suicidal tendencies. He does this by capitalizing on the findings of the Israeli psychology professor, Ariel Merari. Borum claims Merari “is one of the few people in the world to have collected systematic, empirical data on a significant sample of suicide bombers.”53 Merari fully expected to find “suicidal dynamics” and “mental pathology” in his study of Middle East suicide bombers.54 To his surprise, he “found none of the risk factors normally associated with suicide, such as mood disorders or schizophrenia, substance abuse or history of attempted suicide.”55 Borum highlighted the differences in motive between a jihadist seeking martyrdom and a clinically diagnosed person with suicidal tendencies, and attributed motive as the reason for the difference in phenomenon. The differences are remarkable. On one hand, suicide in the traditional sense is:

associated with hopelessness and depression. The desire to end intense and unbearable psychological pain typically motivates the actor to commit such an act. Others who care for the actor typically view suicide as an undesirable outcome. Family and loved ones attempt to discourage the behavior and often struggle with feelings of shame if suicide does occur.56

The jihadist, on the other hand, “views their act as one of martyrdom” where “the primary aim of suicide terrorists is not suicide.”57 Salib claims, “They see themselves having a higher purpose and are convinced of an eternal reward through their action.”58 Finally, Borum focused on the stark differences between how those close to the jihadist view suicide attacks and how those close to someone clinically diagnosed as suicidal view suicide. He states:

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people typically associate martyrdom with hopelessness about afterlife rewards in paradise and feelings of heroic sacrifice. The desire to further the cause of Islam and to answer the highest calling in that religion motivates the actor. Others who care for the actor see the pending act as heroic. Family and loved ones typically support the behavior, and, if the event occurs, the family is honored. Not only does the family of a martyr gain forgiveness of their sins in the afterlife, but the supporting community often cares for them socially and financially.59

Thus, Borum’s research suggests suicide bombers (and their supporters) are rational, and in addition, sheds light on possible vulnerabilities – the family and the selflessness of the suicide bomber – that information operations (if policy allows) can target with counterpropaganda. Counterpropaganda: A New Approach

The first major recommendation this paper broaches is for the NSCT to entertain the deliberate targeting of the suicide bomber’s family. Counterpropaganda at the expense of the family that the potential suicide bomber leaves behind may serve to influence the bomber’s decision before he makes it. Specifically, any exalted family status or references to martyrdom should cease. Any money or property traditionally given to the families of suicide bombers (after the act) should be sought after and frozen. This is not a radical departure from the current strategy, since it already targets individuals and freezes terrorist funds. The counterpropaganda initiative should advertise the intention that families of suicide bombers will be investigated for charges of abetting and incarcerated if found guilty. In addition, seeking “blood money” is an accepted Muslim tradition when death is involved. Tribal sheiks do not use it as a traditional form of compensation for the death of innocent bystanders during suicide bombings; however, pushing the issue in the Muslim communities puts a “Muslim face” on the counterpropaganda approach. It also serves as an additional complication for the families of suicide bombers. Holding tribal sheiks accountable for the families of suicide bombers, even when the bombers act without tribal leader knowledge, is another way of collecting “blood money” and leverages practiced regional culture.

Successful counterpropaganda in this form relies on a premise previously discussed in the section regarding psychology of terrorism. Borum suggested that selflessness is a trait commonly found in suicide bombers, yet is uncharacteristic of those clinically diagnosed as suicidal.60 This phenomenon serves as the cornerstone intended to make the potential suicide bomber recruit reconsider. The counterpropaganda initiative targets the selflessness trait inherent in suicide bombers. The burden and pain deliberately leveraged on the bomber’s family is intended to prey on the conscience of a selfless suicide bomber recruit. Paramount to the success of this counterpropaganda approach is the media coverage intended to advertise and exploit. Media coverage of the first time this is exploited serves as an example for future families of potential suicide bombers to contemplate.

Computer Network Operations (CNO) is another element of information operations that could supplement the counterpropaganda efforts designed to target the families of potential suicide bombers. Jarret Brachman, in a recent ROA National Security Report, highlighted the rise of jihadi-based internet sites that have been used as recruiting tools. He also revealed, “Several pockets of expertise have emerged within the public and private sectors that understand how and where jihadi Web propagandists post their material… which is meant to gain support from sympathizer audiences while demoralizing Americans and their allies.”61 Knowing this, it is not beyond reason to suggest that aggressive CNO efforts linking advertising experts with science and technology agencies could outmaneuver jihadi web-site recruiting efforts. Viruses, pop-ups, attaching unwanted files with counterpropaganda, and manipulating jihadi files are but a few examples of how CNO could possibly disrupt jihadi websites while targeting potential suicide bomber recruits and their families. Counterdeception – A New Approach

The second major recommendation of this paper is to recognize the possibilities of counterdeception. A counterdeception plan that utilizes Sunni imams as delivery platforms strikes at the motivational cornerstone of all Islamic-based suicide bombers. Recruitment propaganda hinges on distorted interpretations of Koranic verses that justify killing infidels and achieving instant

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heavenly rewards if one dies in an act of Jihad. While these Koranic verses do exist, most Muslims disagree with over their meaning. In fact, there are alternative Koranic versus for every militant one addressing similar topics. In light of the previous discussion on the psychology and motivation of the suicide bomber, implanting after-life doubt with verses of the Koran delivered by Sunni imams is bound to give potential suicide bombers pause. In fact, since suicide bombers are considered rational thinkers, a sequenced dosage of the appropriate Koranic teachings delivered by imams should help unhinge the deception used by recruiters. After all, who is willing to rush to eternal damnation if there is any doubt? On the surface, leveraging Sunni Imams as a counterpropaganda delivery means may appear too sensitive for U.S strategy; however, a raging debate among mainstream Muslims indicates they are poised to place a “Muslim face” on the repair to damages inflicted by terrorism. Ziauddin Sardar, a leading Muslim writer for Guardian Unlimited, may have said it best, “We have given free reign to fascism within our midst, and failed to denounce fanatics who distort the most sacred concepts of our faith. We have been silent as they proclaim themselves martyrs, mangling beyond recognition the most sacred meaning of what it is to be a Muslim.”62 He also states that “the silent Muslim majority must now become vocal,”63 and pleas for Muslims everywhere to “reclaim a balanced view of Islamic terms ….”64 This new rhetoric represents a growing consensus among the Muslim community, and indicates that the United States may be ready to embrace this very paradigm-breaking approach.

Certainly, applying the lessons learned from James Bill and Robert Springborg’s Politics in the Middle East treatment of Egyptian twentieth century solutions when Populist Islam (al-Islam al-sha’bi) challenged Established Islam (al-Islam al-rasmi) are worth exploring. In their book, Bill and Springborg classify “established religion” as one that “adheres closely to the ideal described in texts and interpreted by religious scholars. In many cases, it is a state religion and as such is formally bound up in the legitimacy of government.”65 On the other hand, Populist Religion speaks to those less accessible to the clerics of an established religion.66 The threat, as Bill and Springborg suggest, occurs when populist movements undermine the governmental support that “established Islam” advocates. Richard Bulliet claims the threat is a centuries-old manifestation stemming from a lack of authoritative hierarchy and centralized institutions.67 Prompted by European pressure, Egypt sought to suppress the “excesses of popular religion” that Sufi movements posed.68 Some of the Egyptian approaches that were designed to quell Sufi movements are certainly not beyond consideration in today’s crisis within Islam. They are:

… preaching Friday sermons that underscore obedience to authority, …issuing fatwas supportive of governmental policies; outlawing various manifestations; subordinating outlying factions (in Egypt’s case the Sufi movement) by appointing them roles as civil servants responsible to the government; and monitor the activities of preachers and occasionally restrict their movements, imprison them, or close the mosques in which they preach.69

Finally, Bill and Springborg pointed out Egypt’s efforts in the 1970s to lull followers away from populist imams that received private endowments to preach from the growing numbers of smaller mosques. The governmental efforts to centralize and fund imam training, place imams on a public payroll, as well as build, clean and repair mosques served to control and attract worshippers from those who preached from a populist pulpit.70 These same practices that achieved moderately successful results for Egypt to abolish the perceived threat of Sufism are worthy of consideration in today’s crisis in Islam where some populist movements broach Jihad and suicide bombing.

Richard Bulliet draws similar conclusions, but proposes additional measures that counterdeception efforts could exploit. Recognizing the impact that the modern state, the modern media, and the modern citizen made to weaken state-sponsored Islamic authorities, Bulliet argues modern solutions must address the modern challenges.71 In addition to his hard-line stance towards enforcing state-sponsored rules, Bulliet proposes a long-term solution that leverages education. He suggests that moderate Islamists can be marginalized by “providing educational and research institutions that exist independently from both traditional seminaries and formal government educational systems.”72 By providing “venues for modern Muslim intellectuals to develop new ideas about contemporary issues,”73 state-sponsored education and research can better satisfy the “many Muslims whose spiritual, moral, and intellectual needs have not been met by the faith’s traditional institutions.”74 In theory, this would reduce the population base of those willing to resort

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to radical Caliphate solutions, which in turn, decreases the suicide bomber recruitment base. Placed in the context of today’s Global War on Terrorism, state-sponsored religious efforts could empower and leverage Sunni imams in a way that counterpropaganda can exploit.

New concessions are necessary if Sunni imams are used to wage a suicide bomber counterdeception campaign. Religious engagement at the highest level is paramount. Understanding and engaging the Mufti hierarchy, without being intrusive, offers a “top-down” opportunity to influence the Sunni faction. Although Bulliet argues there is no well-defined hierarchy, some evidence exists that he may only be partially correct. During our Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) I and II deployment, my battalion, Task Force 2-3 Field Artillery, identified a Sunni hierarchy that distributed common themes on a weekly basis. By engaging one of the most influential Sunni imams in Iraq (the Sheik of the Al-Nida Mosque in Baghdad) on a regular basis and through weekly Friday mosque monitoring, I learned that the head Mufti (religious leader) from the Gaylani Shrine located in the Rusafa District of Baghdad was viewed as the top religious authority among Sunnis. The Mufti used the Al-Nida Mosque’s (Adhamiya District of Baghdad) imam to distribute Fatwahs and common messages to the larger mosques throughout Iraq. By Tuesday each week, mosques throughout Iraq possessed the Mufti’s message and were under instruction to include it in Friday’s holy day gathering.75 Because I often engaged the imam from the Al-Nida Mosque, he offered to provide the Task Force advance warning on the Tuesday prior if any of the messages meant for Friday were contentious. To be certain, the power of religious engagement and learning the Mufti hierarchy is worth exploring. The potential when leveraging Sunni imams to deliver counterdeception messages that address a population influenced by deceptive Koranic verses used by suicide bombing recruiters is huge, but remains untapped.

Holding Sunni imams accountable, while also diverting credit to them, is a huge task. This requires both overt and, at times, covert “mosque monitoring”76 during Friday’s Call to Prayer and services. The short-term benefit of mosque monitoring is that it allows military units or government authorities to quickly persuade or replace imams who preach violent messages. The long-term benefit of mosque monitoring is that it lends itself to pattern analysis where geographical regions prone to fomenting violence can be identified early. In short, its use can be instrumental when taking a proactive stance towards potential suicide bomber recruiting hotbeds. In the First Armored Division, we found that the imams of smaller mosques, less prone to state-sponsorship, were more likely to advocate violence and terrorist behavior. Once identified, a variety of techniques were used to defuse the influence that a violent pulpit had on potential suicide bombers. Religious engagement was always the first attempt. If this did not work, I was often asked by the Division’s leadership to leverage the influential imam from the Al-Nida Mosque. If he could not convince a wayward imam from preaching violent messages, the First Armored Division would either arrest the imam or seek his replacement through the Minister of Religion. Some of the more elusive cases occurred when a violent mosque message was delivered by an imam who was only visiting. Holding imams responsible for guest preachers could be enforced by the Minister of Religion. Many Muslim countries have a Ministry of Religious Affairs. This influential position can, and should, be used to replace wayward imams that either choose not to support the counterdeception plan or flagrantly preach militant Koranic verses. Mosque monitoring is easier to accomplish when military units are in theater, but poses a unique challenge for potential recruiting hot-beds (Saudi Arabia and Pakistan) devoid of U.S. troops. In light of the possible benefit of using Sunni imams in counterdeception, a strategic need for counterdeception as an element of information operations when the military cannot be present exists. Recommended Changes for the National Strategy for Combating Terrorism and National Strategic Plan for the War on Terrorism (NMSP-WOT)

In order to capitalize on the findings and proposals identified in this paper, the Department of Defense needs to include supplemental policy guidance for the National Strategy for Combating Terrorism. The NMSP-WOT, is a vast improvement, but it still lacks a short-term focus that separately addresses what it takes to counter suicide bombers. To recap the reasons for changes to both strategies, the current strategies propose measures more suitable for countering secular-based terrorism. The strategy is an improvement, but its guidance still falls short. Also, while important, the long-term counterterrorism focus (promote democracy and regional stability, globally

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assist states that need it, and win the war of ideas) needs a short-term catalyst oriented toward the nation’s most prevalent and dangerous threat – the suicide bomber motivated by Islamic fanaticism. In addition, the policy guidance’s new wording should “pull no punches” and target an enemy vulnerability that the current strategies barely address – recruitment. In order to pursue this, policy guidance must be willing to leverage and monitor Sunni imams in an unprecedented counterdeception plan. Secondly, policy guidance must entertain a counterpropaganda plan that targets families of potential suicide bombers. These two underutilized elements of information operations (counterdeception and counterpropaganda) can help achieve the desired third order effects of dissuading potential suicide bombers, but they must first hurdle the paradigm shift embedded in a strategy that avoids addressing religion and family. Certainly a strategy that “relies on ingenuity and innovation”77 as well as “targeting individuals”78 is ready for change. Streamlining Doctrine and Strategy

The elements of information operations identified in this paper as possible solutions for countering suicide bomber recruitment cannot be executed, nor meet strategic guidance, without changing Joint Publication 3-13. Counterdeception and counterpropaganda are elements of information operations outlined in the Army’s Field Manual 3-13; however the Joint community did not include the two elements in the JP 3-13 when it solicited input from each of the services for the writing of JP 3-13. As identified in this paper, counterdeception and counterpropaganda are viable concepts that may at times be beyond the ability of the Army to execute. As a result, there will be times where strategy dictates an effect that cannot be achieved because there is no joint overlap capability. This is the case with counterpropaganda and counterdeception. An additional doctrine and strategy disconnect exists for CNO. The JP 313 assigned USSTRATCOM as the agency responsible for CNO. The National Military Strategic Plan for the War on Terrorism; however, excluded STRATCOM from its list of combatant commands that receive strategic guidance for the Global War on Terrorism. This oversight (or deliberate exclusion) undermines the potential that this paper suggests CNO could contribute to the counterpropaganda efforts. Fixing the doctrine, streamlining the strategy, determining which agencies are best suited for each task, and subsequently assigning responsibility and resourcing the respective agencies, will permit information operations to better counter the current suicide bomber recruitment threat. Conclusion

In conclusion, the National Strategy for Combating Terrorism and the National Military Strategic Plan for the War on Terrorism shoulder unique challenges posed by a brand of religious extremism. The strategies bundle the national elements of power in a fashion more suitable for long term ways and ends. The effects of globalization, the motivation driving religious extremists, the cultural factors, and the ability of religious extremists to divorce themselves from political objectives underscore a need to supplement the current strategy with a stance more likely to affect the decision of the terrorist during the recruitment stage. The policy should make a concerted effort to target the most lethal terrorist to date – the suicide bomber. Additionally, an inclusive effort should be made to place the Army’s elements of information operations into the Joint Publication 3-13. Finally, the strategies would be well-served to focus untapped resources – the counterpropaganda and counterdeception elements of information operations – on two of the most vulnerable yet influential groups: the families of potential suicide bombers, and the imams. Endnotes 1 T.P. Schwartz – Barcott, War, Terror & Peace in the Qur’an and in Islam: Insights for Military & Government Leaders (Carlisle, PA: Army War College Foundation Press, 2004), 67. 2 The Gallup Poll, available from http://poll.gallup.com/content/default.aspx?ci=1633; Internet; accessed 21 November 2005. 3 U.S. Department of the Army, Information Operations:Doctrine, Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures, Field Manual 3-13 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of the Army, 28 November 2003), iii. 4 1st Information Operations Command, Information Operations, Capabilities, Applications and Planning Course, Student Guide (Ft Belvoir, VA: 1st IO Command, October 2004), 14. 5 Lydia Saad, “Support for U.S. Policy in Iraq is Dwindling,” 21 September 2005, linked from The Gallup Poll available from http://poll.gallup.com/content/default.aspx?ci=18718; Internet; accesed 21 November 2005. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid.

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8 George W. Bush, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, D.C.: The White House, September 2002), 5. 9 Ibid. 10 George W. Bush, National Strategy for Combating Terrorism (Washington, D.C.: The White House, February 2003), 16. 11 Stephen P. Lambert, The Sources of Islamic Revolutionary Conduct (Washington, D.C.: Joint Military Intelligence College, 2005), 63. 12 Ibid. 13 United States Institute of Peace, “Causes of Islamic Extremism,” available from http://www.usip.org/peacewatch/2002/6/extremism.html; Internet; accessed 16 November 2005. 14 Bush, National Strategy for Combating Terrorism , 15. 15 United Nations Security Council, Resolution 1373 (2001), Adopted by the Security Council at its 4385th meeting, on 28 September 2001, 1. 16 United Nations Security Council Counterterrorism Committee, “U.S. Report to the Counterterrorism Committee Pursuant to Paragraph 6 of Security Council Resolution 1373 of September 2001 Implementation of UNSCR 1373, “ available from http://www.fas.org/irp/threat/unsc.html; Internet; accessed 10 November 2005. 17 Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Special Report to the UNCTC on OSCE Anti-terrorism Assistance, 6 March Special Meeting, 24 July 2003, 1-7. 18 Matthew J. Morgan, “The Origins of New Terrorism” in National Security Policy and Strategy, Volume III, (Carlisle Barracks: U.S. Army War College, 27 October 2005), 70. 19 Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win (New York: Random House, 2005), 237. 20 Ibid., 249-250. 21 Morgan, 70. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Brian Jenkins, The Likelihood of Nuclear Terrorism , P-7119 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, July 1985). 25 Morgan, 72. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Bush, National Strategy for Combating Terrorism , 24. 32 Ibid. 33 Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 20. 34 Morgan,74. 35 Shaikh Osama Bin Muhammad Bin Laden, Ayman al Zawahiri, Abu-Yasir Rifa’l Abu Taha, Shaikh Mir Hamzah, and Faslul Rahman, “The World Islamic Front’s Statement Urging Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders,” London al-Quds al-Arabia, 23 Feb 1998. 36 Pape, 73. 37 Ibid, 65. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid, 76. 40 Steven Simon and Daniel Benjamin, “The Terror,” Survival, 43 (Winter 2001), 12. 41 Randy Borum, Psychology of Terrorism (Tampa: University of South Florida, 2004), 33. 42 K. Pearce, “Police Negotiations,” Canadian Psychiatric Association Journal, 22, 171-174. 43 Borum , 32. 44 N. Friedland, Becoming a Terrorist: Social and Individual Antecedents (New York: New York: Prager) 81-93. 45 Charles Ruby, “Are Terrorists Mentally Deranged?” Analysis of Social Issues and Public Policy, Vol 2 (1) 2002, 15-26. 46 Ibid. 47 H.H.A. Cooper, “Psychopath as Terrorist,” Legal Medical Quarterly, 2, 253-262. 48 Ibid., 34. 49 Ibid. 50 Pape, 61. 51 Borum , 33. 52 A. Silke, The Psychology of Suicidal Terrorism (London: John Wiley), 94.

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53 Borum , 33. 54 Ibid. 55 M. Bond, “The Making of a Suicide Bomber,” New Scientist, Vol 182, no. 2447, 34. 56 Randy Borum, “Understanding the Terrorist Mindset,” FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, 72(7), 7-10. 57 Ibid. 58 Emad Salib, “Suicide Terrorism: A Case of Folie a Plusiers?” British Journal of Psychiatry, 182 (6): 475-476. 59 Borum , Understanding the Terrorist Mindset, 8. 60 Borum, Psychology of Terrorism , 35. 61 Jarret Brachman, “Internet as Emirate: Al-Qaeda’s Pragmatic Use of the Virtual Jihad,” ROA National Security Report at www.ROA.org; Internet; accessed 30 December 2005. 62 Ziauddin Sardar, “My Fatwa on the Fanatics,” 23 September 2001, linked from Guardian Unlimited, available from http://www.guardian.co.uk/archive/article.html; Internet; accessed 4 Nov 2005. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid. 65 James A. Bill and Robert Springborg, Politics In The Middle East (New York: HarperCollins College Publishers, 1994), 58-59. 66 Ibid, 59. 67 Richard Bulliet, “The Crisis Within Islam,” Wilson Quarterly (Winter 2002): 11 68 Bill and Springborg, 59. 69 Ibid, 59-61. 70 Ibid, 61. 71 Bulliet, 18. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid. 75 Task Force 2-3 FA’s identification of the Gaylani Shrine and Al-Nida Mosque connection occurred when mosque monitoring across the First Armored Division’s assigned zones in Baghdad on a particular Friday identified a common message that was suspiciously coincidental. On that particular Friday, Sunni imams throughout Baghdad preached against the Coalition placing women in prison. The Al-Nida Mosque, located in the Adhamiya District of Baghdad, is one of the most prominent Sunni Mosques in Iraq. The Imam of this particular mosque preaches to six thousand Sunnis on Friday, and was prominent enough that he became someone I engaged often. As a result, he confirmed the Mufti hierarchy and even offered to tell me the Fatwahs and common themes on the Tuesday before he delivered them to the other mosques for the upcoming Friday’s prayer. 76 Mosque monitoring was first used and developed by Task Force (Gunner) 2-3 FA in the First Armored Division during OIF1. The Division approved the concept and emplaced it across all Baghdad districts. Units had the luxury of developing their own techniques, however, a weekly standardized report and database were consolidated at the division in order to identify patterns of fomenting violence. 77 Bush, National Strategy for Combating Terrorism , 29. 78 Ibid, 15. Table of Contents

US Looks To Military to Take on Cyber Threats By Tom Young, Computing (UK), 10 Jan 2008The US Air Force is to create a 30,000-strong cyber warfare centreThe US Air Force (USAF) is setting up a command centre to be responsible for conducting offensive and defensive military operations in cyberspace.The unit known as Afcyber will be fully up and running by the end of this year, with 30,000 staff headed by former Pentagon chief information officer Major General William Lord.The centre is emblematic of a significant change to the role of the air force, according to Major Bruce Jenkins of the USAF.“The aim is to bring space and air-based assets to bear on cyber warfare in any way possible, which represents a dramatic shift in thinking,” he said.At this stage, plans for the Afcyber centre include three main elements:- Assessment of US defence systems’ vulnerability to electronic attack, and improvements to their resilience.

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- Co-ordination with the physical armed forces to attack enemies with a presence in cyberspace.- $10m-worth (£5m) of annual funding for the largest ever research centre looking at software application weak points.The role of cyberspace in military operations is growing, as are concerns about the potential of electronic threats, Howard Schmidt, former special adviser to the White House, told Computing.“Many countries have set up organisations that deal with cyber security at a nation state level they have created national strategies and engaged private industry to do more to protect critical systems that run the critical infrastructure,” he said.The first inkling of the scale of the threat came with the Nimda virus attacks on US government systems exactly a week after the 11 September terrorist strikes. The White House never identified the origin of the virus, but alerted officials to the dangers.And as developed countries move national infrastructures such as banking and communications systems online, vulnerability to cyber attack is exponentially increased.The difficulty is that counter-espionage the traditional weapon against terrorist organisations as well as hostile nation states is not easy to carry out on the internet.“A country’s systems face so many different types of threat, and it is so hard to work out where they originate from, that defending against them can be very difficult,” said Schmidt.Perpetrators are hard to find and hard to identify. Large botnets, for example which are networked groups of zombie computers can be run by an individual, a criminal organisation or a nation state.The US does have cyber non-aggression treaties with its allies, as well as legislation aimed at preventing electronic espionage for economic purposes.But an organisation can simply deny its role, said Schmidt.“There are a lot of things out there that prohibit cyber attacks,” he said. “The problem is finding out and proving who is really doing it.”What about the UK?The US is not the only country establishing a military command centre for cyber warfare. Canada and Australia have similar programmes. But in the UK, the job is spread around civilian organisations.The security services carry out intelligence operations in cyberspace. And the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure advises businesses. But as the threat grows, firms are increasingly unhappy.After last month’s MI5 warnings that the Chinese army could be spying on UK firms, chief security officers described the government’s response as “not fit for purpose” and “like neighbourhood watch”.Table of Contents

Intel Brief: Chinese CyberwarfareBy Rachel F Kesselman, ISN Security Watch, 11/01/08A Chinese hacker community, referring to itself as "Honker Union," declared war on US government and business websites in 2001. The group claimed responsibility for attacks against the US Geological Survey, NASA, Cornell University and more than 100 other US government and business sites since 30 April of that year.Honker Union's website directed interested hackers to contact "Lion," a hacker believed to be responsible for spreading the Lion Worm, a program that captures passwords from operating systems and transmits them to an e-mail address in China.In 2002, another Chinese group by the name of "netXeyes" developed additional Microsoft Windows NT/2000/XP hacking tools, namely a brute force password cracker, a Windows Management Interface cracker and a command line redirection and sniffing tool.The premier piece of software in the netXeyes armory, however, was a system referred to as Fluxay. According to the Spyware Guide, a public reference site for spyware and greynet research, the

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program is a backdoor trojan that "enables an attacker to get nearly complete control over an infected PC."In 2004, Chris McNab, technical director of Matta, a UK-based security consulting firm, predicted that 2004 would be the year of the Chinese hacker. However, it appears that 2006 was likely the landmark year for the return of Chinese malicious internet activity.According to a 2006 US Defense Department report, the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) began developing information warfare reserves and militia units in 2005, often incorporating them into broader exercises and training. The establishment of this elite Chinese unit is evident by a likely increase in sophisticated attacks on high-risk targets.Reports in Chinese newspapers also suggest that the Chinese are actively attempting to establish a cybermilitia. A Time Magazine article entitled "Enemies at The Firewall" purports that the military has put forth a concerted effort to carry out nationwide recruiting campaigns in hopes of discovering the country's most brilliant hackers.A 2005 World Tribune article discusses China's rapid economic expansion in relation to its hacker recruitment program. According to the report, Beijing is actively funding a recruitment drive that in addition to recruiting its own citizens targets some of "best and brightest IT graduates from US universities."In July 2006, the State Department claimed that Chinese hackers broke into their systems. The attacks originated in the East-Asia Pacific region, affecting unclassified computer systems at US embassies there and eventually working their way to State Department headquarters in Washington, DC.The US government's Commerce Department admitted in October 2006 that it had sustained heavy attacks on its computers from hackers working through Chinese servers, forcing the bureau to lock down internet access for more than a month.An attack against computers of the Bureau of Industry and Security, the branch of the Commerce Department responsible for overseeing US exports that deal with both commercial and military applications, forced the unit to disable internet access in early September 2006.Richard Stiennan, a principal analyst with security consultancy IT-Harvest, mentioned in a 2006 TechWeb article that "this [Commerce attack] is the third or fourth battle that we've lost to China. It's not a digital Pearl Harbor, not yet, but it's getting closer."In November 2006, hackers from China were also likely behind an intrusion that disabled the US Naval War College's network, forcing it to disconnect from the internet for several weeks.The stakes were likely raised in June 2007 when Chinese hackers allegedly spent several months probing the US Defense Department's computer network that serves the office of Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The cyberattack forced the Pentagon to shut down its unclassified email for nearly three weeks.In December 2007, Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee also detected a "sophisticated cyberattack" that might have compromised the personal information of thousands of visitors to the lab. The FBI and US Department of Homeland Security officials told ABC News that they believed the attacks originated in China with entities from there probing US systems.The attacks are not limited to US networks and also include heavy attacks on the UK, Germany and South Korea. According to a 2007 article in the British newspaper the Guardian, Whitehall officials claim that virtual attacks originating in China were responsible for shutting down part of the UK House of Commons computer system.Earlier in 2007, the Chinese also allegedly hacked into computer systems in the office of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and three German ministries. The hackers are said to have stolen computer data through the installation of trojan spyware.In 2004, the Chinese are believed to have compromised 211 South Korean government computers, as well as 67 other machines belonging to companies, media groups and universities. The attackers utilized trojan programs to obtain classified documents on weapons systems.

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All of these hacking incidents allegedly perpetrated by the Chinese are likely seen as an ongoing effort to develop computer warfare capability. In a Chinese white paper that describes military strategy, the country establishes "informationised armed forces" as one of three pillars of its military strategy, setting forth the goal of building itself a cyberarmy that could win such a war by 2050.The 2006 US Defense Department report states that "during a military contingency, information warfare units could support active PLA forces by conducting 'hacker attacks' and network intrusions, or other forms of 'cyber' warfare, on an adversary's military and commercial computer systems, while helping to defend Chinese networks."In his testimony to US Congress on 25 April 2007, Sami Saydjari, who has worked on cyberdefense systems for the Pentagon since the 1980s, warned President George W Bush that "the situation was grave, with nation-states such as China developing serious offensive capabilities [...]."A Pentagon report obtained by The Times spells out a detailed plan in which Chinese military hackers are preparing to disable the US aircraft battle carrier fleet with a devastating cyberattack. The planned assault was designed by two hackers working for the PLA and is in line with Beijing's plan to achieve "electronic dominance" over the US, Russia, UK and South Korea.According to a December 2007 article in the Financial Times, Yuval Ben-Itzhak, chief technology officer for Finjan, a web security group with headquarters in San Jose, California, noted that "in the last three months, the attacks [from China] have almost tripled."China's information warfare expertise likely stems from a group that refers to itself as the "Red Hackers Alliance." The Alliance operates as a government- or party-backed organization that specializes in network security, software development and patriotic hacker training.The Alliance was once considered the fifth largest hacking organization in the world. Its website was established at the end of 2000 and had 80,000 members at its peak. Although the network disintegrated at the end of 2004 for no apparent reason, it is highly likely that this organization has regrouped and is now working in conjunction with the PLA and largely responsible for the increase in attacks on global networks.Cybercrime lawyer and security expert Parry Aftab was quoted in a TechNewsWorld article as saying "The good thing is, the United States has been preparing for this for a long time." The Pentagon released a report in 2000 stating that within two decades, US military forces will "develop the capability to conduct attacks on foreign computers and networks while defending its systems against strategic information warfare strikes."In 2001, Aviation Week & Space Technology claimed that the US Air Force had begun a "quiet" series of organization changes that were intended to make maximum use of "cyber-weapons."Recent global attacks have likely prompted NATO to develop a cyberwarfare plan quicker than it had intended. NATO defense ministers met in the Netherlands in October 2007 to discuss cyberdefense, debating the effectiveness of The Organization's own cyberdefense policies as well as how best to support other member states in the aftermath of an attack.NATO developed cyberdefense capabilities in 2000 after a series of attacks originating from Balkan states, and the organization's finalized policy will be announced in 2008 at a NATO summit meeting for heads of state. However, as the Chinese actively search for new methods to penetrate government networks, it is unlikely that countermeasures will be entirely foolproof."I always thought that the face of the new generation of hackers would be Chinese. There is just so many of them, and they are an emerging technology power," said Roger Thompson, chief technology officer at Exploit Prevention Labs in Pennsylvania.Table of Contents

Millions Able To Receive Hizbullah TVBy Yaniv Berman, Jerusalem Post, Jan. 10, 2008 THAICOM, a private satellite company in Thailand, has begun airing the broadcasts of Hizbullah's Al-Manar TV. The satellite covers Asia, Australia, Africa, the Middle East, and most of Europe.

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The Thai satellite has significantly boosted the resonance of Al-Manar's propaganda messages around the world, said the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC) in Herzliya, Israel. "This is an outrage," said ITIC head, Dr. Reuven Erlich. "Other satellites have stopped airing Al-Manar, so Hizbullah has found a way round it." Approached by The Media Line THAICOM said it is considering its response and will only offer a formal reaction over the weekend. However, company sources said the decision to transmit Al-Manar broadcasts was a "purely business decision, which had nothing to do with politics." THAICOM considers Al-Manar programming as "news and entertainment," the sources said. The United States' Department of State decided in December 2004 to add Al-Manar to its Terrorist Exclusion List. Since then, the European satellites Hispasat and Eutelsat have ceased airing the station's broadcasts. "It's a war. Al-Manar is Hizbullah's main communication tool, through which it spreads anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic, and anti-American incitement. It spreads Hizbullah and Iranian values of radical Islam," Erlich explained. He added that the fact that Al-Manar can now be seen in south-east Asia, means that Indonesia and Malaysia, two countries with a large Muslim population, are open to its messages of hatred. In the past few years since the European satellites stopped airing Al-Manar, the station could only be seen via two Arab satellites: Nilesat and Arabsat. The former is an Egyptian-owned satellite, which broadcasts to the Middle East, North Africa, and a few countries in southern Europe. The latter is a pan-Arab satellite, with approximately the same reach.Table of Contents

Unlikely GI Wins Hearts in IraqBy Peter Graff, Reuters (via New Zealand Herald), January 10, 2008As David Matsuda tells it, he's probably the last person you'd expect to see in a US military uniform climbing out of an armoured vehicle in Iraq.An anthropology professor from California State University near San Francisco, he's a self-described peacenik who opposed the war in Iraq and never carries a gun."I'm a liberal. I'm a Democrat," he says. "My impetus is to come here and help end this thing."Dr Matsuda is part of the US military "Human Terrain Team" (HTT) programme, which embeds anthropologists with combat brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan in the hope of helping commanders in the field understand local cultures.The programme is controversial: the American Anthropological Association has denounced it, saying it could lead to ethics being compromised, damage the profession's reputation and, worst of all, to research subjects becoming targets.Dr Matsuda says the concern is based on a misunderstanding. "There's been a knee-jerk reaction in the anthropology community, that you've been co-opted, that you're a warmonger ... I came here to save lives, to make friends out of enemies."Soldiers in northeast Baghdad - an area transformed in the past year from one of the most violent parts of Iraq to one of the best illustrations of the security improvements of late 2007 - are grateful for his expertise as they make the transition from fighting to peacemaking."It's a huge asset," said Staff Sergeant Dustin "Boogie" Brueggemann who, as a tactical psychological operations specialist, has spent the past year trying to win hearts and minds in Adhamiya, until a few months ago one of the most violent strongholds of Sunni Arab militants in Iraq."The guys who were out with him were saying: 'Dr Matsuda's so smart!' Soldiers even on the lowest level now, we see the big picture just by listening to him talk. He gave me so much information that had I known it a year ago I could have done things differently."Dr Matsuda says he arrived at exactly the right time, when a sudden sharp decline in violence opened new opportunities for engagement.

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The brigade is a classic example of last year's new US strategy in Iraq that saw greater numbers of troops deployed to Iraq and more emphasis on interaction with civilians.In the past six months violence plummeted, as Sunni tribal leaders in the Adhamiya district turned against al Qaeda militants, and Moqtada al Sadr, the Shiite cleric whose Mehdi Army militia controls Sadr City, declared a ceasefire.In December 2006, there were 450 killings in the area, mostly by sectarian death squads trying to drive rival groups out of their neighbourhoods. There were just 15 last month, mainly by ordinary criminals.At the weekend, Dr Matsuda - in uniform but unarmed - spent two hours with soldiers from the 7th Cavalry lingering on a street in Adhamiya where a few months ago Americans would have had to fight their way in or out.They meandered in and out of shops, bought falafel sandwiches and ate them on a street corner while playing with local children who already seemed to know their names. Periodically they knocked on doors and asked permission to come inside homes for a chat. They never turned down an offer of tea.Dr Matsuda said he had learned a lot that day - about who was moving into vacant houses and who was renting them out, how a local clinic got its medicines, how shop owners were getting the money to reopen their stores."We have a window of opportunity here to make a difference for these people. We have to take it."Table of Contents

Where War and Porn CollideBy David A. Fulghum, Aviation Week, January 10, 2008New generation cellular telephones -- which offer wider channel width and much faster data rates that allow video and the internet to be shown on a handheld telephone screen -- are being driven by the large commercial market for games, pornography and gambling, say top electronic warfare researchers.That popularity is reducing prices so that these same capabilities are being adopted and reshaped to fill the arsenals of the worlds' military cyber warriors. Military organizations around the globe, including the U.S., are using commercially developed attack and network exploitation technologies to build an arsenal of rapidly upgradable, flexible and hard to avoid cyber weapons.In fact, the ability to move lots of data quickly and securely is expected to eliminate many of the aircrew from the U.S. Air Force's premier Rivet Joint signals intelligence aircraft and the Army and Navy's next attempts at the Aerial Common Sensor, a next-generation intelligence gathering aircraft.As network technology improvements accelerate, however, the typical hacker has changed from the precocious teenager to members of organized crime groups, says Rance Walleston, BAE Systems' director of information warfare and information operations initiative tells Aviation Week & Space Technology."Anybody who has gone after illegal money in the past is just finding a new way to do it," he says. "It's becoming global. We can identify from their methods of attacking networks whether it's Russian or Brazilian crime gangs.""In China, it's like the Wild West of networks," says a military cyber warrior. "They really beat each other up. Cyber warfare is a way of doing business. If you are a voice over IP provider, it's considered fair game for your opponent to take down your network. From a customer's perspective, they just see that their service isn't working. They don't realize that other companies are taking them down so the effect can be used for industrial extortion."It used to be that hackers wanted their name associated with the great vulnerabilities they found. But now that big money is involved, they don't publish what they're doing say cyber specialists.Table of Contents

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Abu Yahya’s Six Easy Steps for Defeating al-QaedaBy Jarret Brachman, Perspectives on Terrorism (issue 5), 2007In his 10 September 2007 video release, Shaikh Abu Yahya al-Libi offered the United States several unsolicited tips for better prosecuting its ‘war of ideas’ against al-Qaeda.[1] Although his comments brought al-Qaeda propaganda to new heights of arrogance, the fact is that Abu Yahya’s recommendations are nothing short of brilliant. Policymakers who are serious about degrading the resonance of the Jihadist message, therefore, would be remiss in ignoring his strategic recommendations simply because of their source. Abu Yahya, a senior member of al-Qaeda, is one of the world’s foremost experts on the strengths and vulnerabilities of the contemporary Jihadist Movement. He became a household name within the counterterrorism community when al-Qaeda began marketing him in their propaganda following his July 2005 escape from detention at Bagram air base in Afghanistan. In the past two years, Abu Yahya has become the al-Qaeda High-Command’s attack dog, chastising a variety of Muslim groups for failing to follow the proper path: with the Shia, Hamas and the Saudi royal family seemingly bearing the brunt of his rage.[2] Al-Qaeda has also promoted Abu Yahya’s softer side, showing him reciting poetry and informally dining with his students. He has become, in a very real sense, the Jihadist for all seasons. Abu Yahya’s decision to volunteer strategic advice to the United States was neither out of goodwill nor self-destructive tendencies. Rather, his comments embodied the explosive cocktail of youth, rage, arrogance and intellect that has made him a force among supporters of the Jihadist Movement. By casually offering his enemy a more sophisticated counter-ideological strategy than the U.S. has been able to implement or articulate to date, Abu Yahya’s point was clear: the U.S. lags so far behind the global Jihadist Movement in its war of ideas that al-Qaeda has little to fear any time soon. Abu Yahya’s strategic plan for improving America’s counter-ideology efforts centers on turning the Jihadist Movement’s own weaknesses against it. He first suggests that governments interested in weakening the ideological appeal of al-Qaeda’s message should focus on amplifying the cases of those ex-Jihadists (or “backtrackers” as he calls them) who have willingly renounced the use of armed action and recanted their previously held ideological commitments. Using retractions by senior thinkers and religious figures who already have established followings within the Jihadist Movement helps to sow seeds of doubt across the Movement and deter those on the ideological fence from joining. Although Arab governments, most notably the Saudis and the Egyptians, have successfully leveraged this approach for decades, there may be particular value in amplifying these retractions in the West. In November 2007, for instance, the legendary Egyptian Jihadist thinker, Dr. Sayyid Imam Sharif, released a book renouncing his previous commitment to the violent Jihadist ideology.[3] As could be expected given Sharif’s senior stature in the Movement, the story made front-page news across the Arab world. In the English-language media, however, the story was little more than a minor blip. The media’s non-coverage of such a major ideological victory against global Jihadism is due to the fact that few in the West appreciate Sayyid Imam’s significance to groups like al-Qaeda. Abu Yahya suggests that the public media can play an effective role in publicizing ideological retractions, particularly by conducting interviews with those reformed scholars, publishing their articles and printing their books. The media’s effort to promote the retractions helps to redirect public attention away from the role of the host government in prompting those retractions in the first place. The more distance these reformed scholars have from their host governments the more they are likely to be perceived as legitimate. Abu Yahya also recommends that the United States both fabricate stories about Jihadist mistakes and exaggerate real Jihadist mistakes whenever they are made. These may include blaming Jihadist terrorism for killing innocents, particularly women, children and the elderly. But he does not stop there. Jihadist mistakes should not simply be highlighted as being anomalous or extraordinary: rather, governments ought to characterize them as being at the core of the Jihadist methodology. In

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short, governments need to convince their populations that the murder of innocent people is a core part of global Jihadism. The most effective way to pursue this strategy, he contends, is to exploit mistakes made by any Jihadist group, whether they are al-Qaeda or not, by casting that action as being emblematic of the entire Jihadist Movement. Abu Yahya calls this strategy of blurring the differences between al-Qaeda and other Jihadist groups when it serves propaganda purposes, “widening the circle.” Pursing this strategy offers the United States significantly more exploitable opportunities for discrediting the actions of the Jihadist Movement writ large. Abu Yahya provides two clarifying examples of existing counterpropaganda initiatives that he found to be effective in damaging the Jihadist Movement’s credibility. The first example is the rumor about an al-Qaeda constitution that stated that death should be the penalty for quitting al-Qaeda. Although Abu Yahya claims that the rumor is fabricated, he concedes that it has effectively painted al-Qaeda in a negative light within the Islamic world. He also points to how the Saudi and Algerian governments successfully characterized Jihadist terrorist attacks against government targets in their countries as actually being attacks against the people of those countries. By downplaying the iconic significance of the buildings and focusing instead on the human victims, casting them as powerless and ordinary, both the Saudis and the Algerians were able to “move emotions” and “whip up storms” across the public against the Jihadist Movement.Abu Yahya’s third strategic point deals with the government’s prompting of mainstream Muslim clerics to issue fatwas (religious rulings) that incriminate the Jihadist Movement and their actions. Abu Yahya shudders at other Muslims’ use of “repulsive legal terms, such as bandits, Khawarij (literally, “those who seceded,” refers to the earliest Islamic sect) and even Karamathians or al-Qaramitah, (“extreme fanatics”) in referring to the Jihadists. Abu Yahya is not the first to make these points, however. In fact, followers of the Saudi Salafist shaikh, Rabi bin Hadi al-Madkhali, frequently used the following terms in order to assault the Jihadists:- “Jihadi:” Anyone who believes that Jihad is a purely individual duty to fight- “Takfiri:” Anyone who excommunicates Arab rulers or Muslims- “Khariji Bandit:” Anyone who actively seeks to overthrow Arab rulers- “Qutubi:” Anyone who reveres, quotes or even positively mentions Sayyid Qutb (an early hard-line Egyptian thinker)- “Hizbi:” Anyone who participates in anti-establishment activist group - “Dirty Groundhog”: a traitor to one’s religion, used specifically against Saudi hard-line cleric, Shaikh Hamoud bin Uqla as-Shuaybi in the 1990s- “Rabid Dogs”: a generic label for extremists- “The Dog”: referring specifically to Usama Bin Ladin- “Perennial Defender of Innovators”: an attack against extremists for rejecting centuries of accepted historical teachings and interpretations of Islam- “Betrayer of the Salafi Way”: used to attack hard-line clerics who step outside the bounds of mainstream Islamic conservatism.[4]Abu Yahya also points to the effectiveness of special committees of scholars who try to deprogram Jihadists in prison. These rehabilitation programs, which are now operating in Egypt, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, have become a central part of these countries’ efforts to weaken the Jihadist Movement, at least in the war of ideas.[5]The fourth component to Abu Yahya’s proposed grand strategy is strengthening and backing Islamic movements far removed from Jihad, particularly those with a democratic approach. Beyond supporting them, he counsels governments to push these mainstream groups into ideological conflict with Jihadist groups in order to keep the Jihadist scholars and propagandists busy responding to their criticisms. This approach is designed to strip the Jihadist Movement of its monopoly on the dialogue and instead unleash a “torrential flood of ideas and methodologies which find backing, empowerment, and publicity from numerous parties” against them.

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There is no doubt that the Jihadist thinkers are most threatened by groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas as well as mainstream Salafists. This is because these groups draw on many of the same religious texts and appeal to the same constituencies for recruitment and financial support.[6] The methodologies of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, however, are significantly more palatable to their host governments than Jihadists. This bitter rivalry between Jihadists and those more moderated groups could be usefully exploited by governments interested in wearing down al-Qaeda’s stamina. Next, Abu Yahya’s recommends aggressively neutralizing or discrediting the guiding thinkers of the Jihadist Movement. His point is that not all Jihadists are replaceable: there are some individuals who provide a disproportionate amount of insight, scholarship or charisma. These individuals include key ideologues like Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, Abu Qatada or Sayyid Imam Sharif; and senior commanders like, Khattab, Yousef al-Ayiri or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. In order to effectively degrade the Jihadist Movement’s long-term capacity, Abu Yahya suggests that these Jihadist luminaries need to be silenced, either through death, imprisonment or perceived irrelevance, thereby leaving the Movement “without an authority in which they can put their full confidence and which directs and guides them, allays their misconceptions, and regulates their march with knowledge, understanding, and wisdom.”The consequence of this power vacuum, he argues, is that “those who have not fully matured on this path or who are hostile to them in the first place, to spread whatever ideas and opinions they want and to cause disarray and darkness in the right vision which every Mujahid must have.” Finally, Abu Yahya advises the United States to spin the minor disagreements among leaders or Jihadist organizations as being major doctrinal and methodological disputes. He suggests that any disagreement, be it over personal, strategic or theological reasons, can be exacerbated by using them as the basis for designating new subsets, or schools-of-thought. These fractures can also serve as useful inroads on which targeted information operations can be focused: such an environment becomes a “safe-haven for rumormongers, deserters, and demoralizers, and the door is left wide open for defamation, casting doubts, and making accusations and slanders,” he explains. This “war of defamation” as he terms it, leaves the Jihadist propagandists almost impotent in that no matter how they try to defend themselves, dispel misconceptions, and reply to accusations, their voice will be as “hoarse as someone shouting in the middle of thousands of people.” In the case of the 10 September 2007 video, Abu Yahya may have let his ego undermine his goal of intimidating the West by offering useful strategic advice. Abu Yahya’s most important contribution is identifying that the best way to defeat al-Qaeda is by tying it up in knots: Al-Qaeda must be continuously forced into a series of compromising positions from a variety of angles so that it hangs itself over the long term. The challenge for the United States is that it is not currently positioned to implement many of Abu Yahya’s strategies, which is why he most likely felt fine sharing them. The fact is that the U.S. is speaking from a non-Islamic perspective, which discredits anything it says regarding the Islamic faith. Furthermore, there is little the U.S. government can say to the Islamic world that will be viewed as anything other than propaganda in support of its military occupation of Iraq as long as it maintains forces on the ground there. The U.S., therefore, must be open to, and innovative with, creating and leveraging a variety of flexible partnerships in its global efforts to degrade the appeal and legitimacy of al-Qaeda over the long-term. NOTES: [1] Abu Yahya al-Libi. 93-minute video tape. Produced by As-Sahab. Recorded early Sha'ban 1428. [2] See Michael Scheuer, "Abu Yahya al-Libi: Al-Qaeda's Theological Enforcer - Part 1," in the Jamestown Foundation's Terrorism Focus, Volume 4, Issue 25 (July 31, 2007) for an in-depth examination of Abu Yahya’s recent statements. [3] The book, Rationalizations on Jihad in Egypt and the World, is being released in serialized format by the Egyptian daily newspaper, Al-Masry al-Youm, November and December 2007. [4]“Summary of the Deviation of The Madkhalee 'Salafiyyah.'” At-Tibyan Publications. [5] See Christopher Boucek’s “Extremist Reeducation and Rehabilitation in Saudi Arabia” in the Jamestown Foundation’s Terrorism Monitor. [6] For a more in-depth discussion of these dynamics, see The Militant Ideology Atlas. Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. http://ctc.usma.edu/atlas/ .

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Decoding the Virtual DragonBy Timothy L. Thomas, Foreign Military Studies Office, Ft Leavenworth, KS, 2007Foreword by Karl Prinslow, Director, Foreign Military Studies Office, 2007This book expands upon Dragon Bytes, the author’s earlier work on Chinese information warfare (IW) activities from 1999-2003. Decoding the Virtual Dragon explains how Chinese IW concepts since 2003 fit into the strategic outlook, practices, and activities of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The book offers IW explanations directly from the pens of Chinese experts. There are few intermediate filters. In some cases direct translations of key Chinese terms are offered. The Chinese authors discuss the application or relation of IW to strategic thought, the transformation plans of the PLA, the revolution in military affairs (RMA), and the revolution in knowledge warfare and cognition. The book thus serves as a source for the fundamentals of Chinese military thought and demonstrates how IW/IO has been integrated into the art of war and strategy.China’s methodological and thought paradigms with regard to strategic IW issues are quite different from the US paradigms. The PLA’s science of military strategy, for example, examines basic and applied theory as well as the objective and subjective aspects of strategy. US military strategy, on the other hand, uses a very different set of analytic tools and processes. It is more focuses on ends, ways, and means or more recently as US joint publications note, prudent ideas or sets of ideas. Decoding the Virtual Dragon underscores this difference in thought processes and explains how China’s strategic approach leads to different applications, methods, and conclusions with regard to IW.Decoding the Virtual Dragon is designed to update analysts about Chinese IW theory and practice. Of special interest is the Chinese focus on topics scarcely mentioned by US IW specialists such as mobilization exercises, the development of IW countermeasures, the theory of a science of information operations, the holistic and comprehensive approach to strategic issues, and a focus on preemption and IW stratagems.Both the general military reader and the Chinese security specialist will enjoy this integrated and progressive look at China’s IW development over the past several years.[Editor note: Contact the author at tim.l.thomas@us.army.mil if you would like a copy of the book. As an added bonus, Mr. Thomas provided books for attendees at this year Army Global IO Conference.] Table of Contents

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