Mumbai Terrorism

Yesterday, the Washington Post ran a front-page article describing how technologically savvy the terrorists who attacked Mumbai were, citing such examples as their use of portable GPS units, satellite telephones, and the use of cellphones with multiple SIM cards to make the phones almost impossible to track. This is important for two main reasons. First, this should not be a surprise, but rather a limited view of what terrorism looks like today and will increasingly look like tomorrow. Second, it highlights the US's--and by extension most of the West's--biggest weaknesses in the struggle against terrorism.

As to the first point, if anyone is surprised by the use of technology by such attackers, the only surprise should be that such tactics are only now surfacing. The oft-mentioned "democratization of technology" does indeed cut both ways, and threatens--in conjunction with terrorist command, control, communications, and intelligence (C3I) strategies--to negate a large portion of the US's technological superiority. Many Americans today take GPS for granted: if it is not built into their vehicles to begin with, anyone can go to their local electronics store and pick up an aftermarket unit for several hundred dollars that not only knows all the roads in America, but where the best local pizza parlor is. Non-automotive GPS is just as cheap and easy to use. A quick trip to an outdoor store or Amazon.com will yield a unit with latitude, longitude, altimiter, and other capabilities for the same few hundred dollars, all in a neat little package about the size of a cell phone. Equipped with such units, the Mumbai attackers hijacked a fishing vessel, successfully navigated it to their pre-identified point of insertion, jumped into Zodiacs for the final approach to shore, and landed. As the Post noted, none of these men had real navigational experience other than their GPS. Aside from the hijacking, this is exactly how US commandos operate--using GPS to navigate directly to their targets and then moving ashore in small boats or by swimming in. The attackers hit the beach, jumped out of their lifeboats, intimidated a couple of locals to keep them quiet, and moved off to hold a major metropolis hostage.

This was a low-budget, high-sophistication operation. Training the attackers was probably the most time- and money-intensive part of the entire plan. Even that was likely not an overly daunting task--all that was needed was a handful of men in good shape with decent weapons skills and a willingness to die. Such people are the raw ingredients of al Qaeda terror, and they are not exactly in short supply. As noted, maritime experience was not a prerequisite--an ability to use or learn how to use GPS was. The use of technology is already pervasive within al Qaeda and it is only growing. Theoretically, the longest pole in the tent for manning and executing such operations is the motivation and dedication of the operators, and, unfortunately, finding highly-motivated suicidal warriors has not proven to be a very high hurdle. Willingness to die in jihad is the hardest part of the whole operation to teach--if men can be found that will carry out the operation with no expectation of living through it and who can and will maintain their dedication at the moment of truth, the rest is relatively easy. Al Qaeda does a teriffic job of uniformly training its adherents to a common operational standard all over the world. An al Qaeda-trained mujahid who is the product of an Afghanistani camp will be able to operate almost seamlessly with another who was trained elsewhere since basic organizational training is standardized. Of the thousands and thousands at this minimum operational level, the leadership selects those who are ahead of the curve in physical conditioning and mental aptitude and who have the greatest dedication to the cause and willingness to die (note that intelligence and willingness to die often go hand-in-hand), and recommend them for operations such as Mumbai.

This brings up the second point, namely that al Qaeda's smart application of technology allows it to compete with and in some cases overcome the absolute technological gradient with the US. Al Qaeda does not have its own satellites, but it still uses satellites to launch attacks. The best part is that they let the US taxpayer foot the bill for putting the birds in orbit--the US launches and operates the vast majority of positioning, imaging, and communications satellites that al Qaeda can use for free. Using commercial GPS, Google Maps, and satellite telephones, al Qaeda can operate a more technologically advanced operation--in real time, no less--than US commanders could dream of twenty or thirty years ago. The evil genius of al Qaeda is that it blends high and low technology so well--the Mumbai attackers used GPS units of (for argument's sake) approximately 2007 vintage to position themselves to hold a major city hostage with AK-47's, designed sixty years earlier. The 9/11 attackers, after having gone to flight school to learn how to steer in a roughly straight line at 500 miles per hour, required nothing more sophisticated than box cutters to take control of 4 aircraft. Essentially, the terrorists let the US do all the technological legwork--R&D, testing, refining, and commercially marketing products--and then takes what it needs on the cheap and uses it to devastating effect against the very people who sold it to them. The US has a vast technological advantage over al Qaeda in absolute terms, but what al Qaeda understands so fundamentally is that sometimes "better is the enemy of good enough." In a couple of years, US commanders will be able to conference via hologram (if Wolf Blitzer can do it during the election, the Joint Chiefs can't be far behind). Al Qaeda does not need to holo-conference, and in fact they know it will harm more than hurt them. They know we can read all their email and phone traffic, so they either stay off the phone or pack multiple SIM cards so that one phone uses a half-dozen numbers. Our military has overhead imaging that can read license-plate numbers, but al Qaeda knows it doesn't need that. Google Earth has more than adequate resolution to get a good sense of terrain and plan a better operation than otherwise would have been possible. Combining a rough overhead image with a less-than-perfect positioning system makes up for the lack of each--sure, their GPS can't find locate the specific five-meter zone on the beach that they want to hit, but it can easily find the whole beach, which doubtless has some visible landmark at the landing site that the operators can find and pre-identify on Google Earth.

In sum, the Mumbai attacks give a frightening but not altogether surprising picture of the ever-adapting face of terrorism. Al Qaeda has proven adept at finding the kind of people it needs to execute its plans and then training them up for their individual missions. Using Western technology against the West, al Qaeda keeps costs low and avoids over-reliance on technological wizardry. To co-opt a Pentagon phrase, al Qaeda equips its men while the West mans its equipment. Flexible, adaptive C3I and constant re-evaluation of doctrine and methods based on what works and what does not are keeping the terrorists almost neck-and-neck and in some areas somewhat ahead of Western forces. The democratization of technology is not going to reverse itself anytime soon, so the West must stop being surprised by the enemy's uses of technology and start finding ways to adapt faster to the threat in order to stay ahead of the terrorists. This requires the human element: we are being "outcommunicated by a man in a cave" and outsmarted by low-technology equipment because al Qaeda by nature must find ways to innovate and stretch low technology to get the most out of it while the West succumbs to the temptation to give in to the siren song of high technology. Clearly, that approach is not working adequately. No overhead imaging, no matter how precise, could have prevented the Mumbai attacks. Thorough human intelligence and police work could have given us a better chance of predicting or stopping the attack. High technology may be sexy, but it cannot replace the decidedly un-sexy role of the intelligence officer poring over piles and piles of material and synthesizing it based on human intellect and instinct into an effective estimate of the evolving threat.

Daily Update

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Today's Update

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