Yonatan Zunger’s Blog

A thought that occurred to me during a conversation earlier today.

A popular buzzword lately has been “asymmetric warfare,” describing engagements between combatants with radically different strengths and weaknesses. One classic example is 9/11, but another example that we shouldn’t ignore is the present war in Iraq. In this case, though, it’s asymmetric in the other direction – we chose the manner of engagement to our maximum advantage. The fact that the war has gone as well as it has so far (knock on wood) is really due to the fact that in large part we set it up to play to our strengths.

This brought to mind a point which I don’t think has been discussed enough in relation to wars in general. Asymmetric warfare situations – which appear to now be the norm for war in general, not just terror activities – place an enormous premium on highly aggressive tactics. The basic reason is that the attacker gets to choose the nature of the engagement, and since asymmetric warfare by its nature is about focusing one’s strengths on the enemy’s weaknesses, this gives a much greater premium than it does in more symmetric conflicts.

If this is correct, then tactics and strategy need to be radically changed from the strategies of symmetric conflicts. Defenses need to be more uniform, not presenting any obvious weak points for an enemy to target. The absence of clear lines of engagement makes this even more severe, since the distinction between military and civilian targets has been eroded into invisibility in the past few years. But more importantly, it suggests that the only way to win an asymmetric conflict is by maximally aggressive tactics, continuously searching out enemy capabilities and striking them at their weakest points.

I’m not entirely happy with this thought, because it seems to argue in favor of several policies that I’m rather leery of – “preventive war,” for example. But I’m not certain if there’s any way around this in the context of highly asymmetric threats.

Well, it looks like the attack threatened yesterday happened – but mercifully didn’t go off as planned. Details here. The big one wasn’t the car bomb at the hotel, but notice a couple of other things:

• Two Stinger missiles (shoulder-mounted heat-seekers) were fired at a B757 as it was taking off from Mombasa airport. This would have been the first successful destruction of a passenger aircraft, not from aboard the craft but from the ground.
• There are also rumors (debka, so take with some grain of salt) that aircraft strafed the hotel building in Kenya which was bombed.
• There were four major, synchronized attacks: The aircraft strike, the Kenya bombing, the attack at the polling place in Israel, and a nearby major car bomb. (Which failed to detonate) Multiple widely separated, synchronized attacks are a classic al Qaeda calling card. (cf. Sept. 11, or the embassy bombings a few years ago)

So yes, sometimes it pays to be paranoid. One interesting point of analysis from debka: “The Mombasa attacks like the Bali bombing targeted exotic tourist spots frequented by Western vacationers – focusing on Australians in the first and Israelis in the second. “