Terrorists are easy to kill, but hard to find.
Imagine that you are an American soldier in Iraq in 2005. You spend much of your time patrolling the streets on foot and in jeeps. Your military uniform gives your identity away immediately. You most likely don't speak the local Arabic dialect, so you don't know what anyone around you is saying. You can only communicate through hand signals or an interpreter, if you have one. The Iraqis know you are coming from a mile away.
You can't tell who the enemy is and who is a civilian. You most likely don't know where the insurgents are, or when they're going to attack you. Meanwhile, the insurgents have learned your rules of engagement and tactics, and have come to anticipate your movements. They can ambush you at will, but often they would rather just mine the road you ride on every day with I.E.D.'s.
One day you discover that someone has placed a $10,000 reward on your head. Your enemies, who are faceless to you, have been photographing your unit and have begun to piece together your organizational structure.
You are in a state of information access inferiority. If you could just face these insurgents on the battlefield, you could overwhelm them with your superior firepower and better training. But most of the time you're getting sucker-punched by weaker forces who instead of having conventional military superiority, have the advantage in the amount and quality of information that they can access.
The side with information access superiority has the advantage in unconventional warfare. Information access superiority is a necessary prerequisite for successful special operations, a category that, in our opinion, includes terrorist attacks.
Information access superiority has three components:
1. Environmental Information Access – You know more about the human and natural environment than the enemy knows.
2. Access Relative to Enemy– Your know more about the enemy than the enemy knows about you.
3. Undiscovered Information Access– You have access to information that the enemy isn't aware that you have.
Information access inferiority is the biggest obstacle facing the United States in the 21st century security environment. It is the reason that the U.S. has been unable to destroy the Al Qaeda and Taliban safehaven in Pakistan. This safehaven is the main reason that the U.S. is still fighting struggling with the insurgency in Afghanistan.
The U.S. does not lack the material ability to blow up targets in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan; it has predator drones that can destroy any target in the region, as it has repeatedly demonstrated. The U.S. lacks the information access necessary to destroy Al Qaeda central, not the military capacity.
In many areas like the FATA, where terrorists have avoided our attempts at signal intelligence, information access superiority is only possible through human sources. In this field, the United States is especially weak. We will discuss the development of human sources at length in a later post.
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