6 July 2021
The 21st century has seen the rise of “new wars” in which violent non-state actors (VNSAs) employ tactical means of asymmetric warfare and facilitate digital technologies for their purposes. To secure their population and stabilise the liberal international order, nation-states must deepen their cooperation and increase interoperability in strategy, operational approach, and information-sharing.
Definition of Violent Non-State Actors
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, warfare, and hence defence missions, became increasingly defined by threats posed by violent non-state actors. VNSAs threaten public safety, governmental authority, and international security in the form of terrorist groups, warlords, militias, criminal organisations, and paramilitary forces (Williams 4, 2008). The term “violent non-state actor” indicates the establishment of an organisational structure outside of national and international governance structures, ranging from highly organised paramilitary forces, over more loosely affiliated terrorist organisations, to small groups or single actors driven by fundamentalist ideology to commit violent acts (Hofmann 27, 2012). Today, the internal organisation of VNSAs, the coordination of terrorist acts, and the recruitment of new affiliates is aided by the use of publicly available encrypted messaging services (Graham 21, 2016).
Further, VNSAs are defined by their tactics of employing violent means to disturb public peace and challenge nation-states, with their attacks being directed towards representatives of nation-states – embassies, military bases, government buildings, and public and military service members, such as the 2012 Benghazi attack against US government facilities in Libya – as well towards the public, such as the 9/11 Attacks or the November 2015 Paris Attacks. VNSAs often employ a combination of professional military training and tactics together with improvised weapons, such as improvised explosive devices (IED), that are more cost-efficient and harder to monitor than traditional weapon systems (Department of Homeland Security, 2021).
Given their obscure organisational structure, secretive communication channels aided by encrypted messaging services, and the usage of improvised weapons, VNSAs constitute a high-risk security threat that is difficult to monitor and combat.
VNSAs as Threat to the Westphalian State and the Liberal International Order
While guerrilla tactics and paramilitary forces in the form of militias are as old as warfare itself, VNSAs have emerged as a significant security challenge to the Westphalian state after the end of the Cold War, as terrorist groups sought to undermine the security and power of foreign nation-states to challenge the liberal international order (Williams 5, 2008). This is evidenced by the fact that NATO’s mutual defence clause, developed as deterrence against the violation of a nation state’s territorial integrity by the Soviet Union, was only evoked once, and that being after the collapse of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact: in response to the 9/11 terrorist attack on the United States.
Consequently, VNSAs also pose a significant threat to militaries. For instance, the 1983 Beirut barracks bombings claimed the lives of 241 US, 58 French military personnel, and six civilians – which marked the highest number of US causalities on a single day since the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam. Yet, the assassinated soldiers did not even engage in active combat. The attacked American and French soldiers served in the Multinational Force (MNF) in Lebanon, a military peacekeeping operation during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990). The attack led to the withdrawal of the troops, resulting in an expansion of the influence of Hezbollah (Rosen 2009). Later, during the Third Gulf War, among the 457 hostile causalities the Western coalition suffered in Iraq between May 2006 and February 2007, three out of five were caused by an IED; similarly and over the same period, 25% of hostile causalities in Afghanistan were attributed to the explosion of an IED (Bird/Fairweather 841, 2007).
In the age of digitalisation, counter-terrorism analysts also expect a continued increase of terrorist threats, given the potential to exploit social media and artificial intelligence for propaganda and violent purposes. For instance, the hope that jihadist movements would become fringe groups in the course of the Arab Spring quickly proved illusional, as terrorist groups started to employ social media for recruitment, just as protestors did for mobilisation (Gartenstein-Ross, 2018). This facilitation of social media resulted in new recruitment spikes in vulnerable regions and a growing risk of misleadingly called “lone wolf attacks” in Western states, as these kinds of attack often were either inspired by social media propaganda or directly in contact with terrorist groups via freely available encrypted messaging apps (Klausen, 2017). On another level, counter-terrorism experts warn that terrorist groups, especially highly professionalised ones such as the Islamic State (IS), will also use machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies to map and predict the movement of individual targets and military units (Gartenstein-Ross, 2018).
Another challenge is the effort – and success – of terrorist groups in acquiring weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Be it for terrorist attacks on the public (such as the Aum Shinrikyo in Japan in the first half of the 1990s using chemical and biological weapons), or terrorist acts against governmental or military representatives (such as the use of Sulfur Mustard gas by IS in the Syrian Civil War beginning in 2015), terrorist groups have used WMD, and will likely continue to do so in the future (Schmitz 8, 2020).
Enhance Interoperability to Combat VNSAs
For centuries, warfare has been defined as a series of battles between militaries of warring nation-states. Typically, VNSAs are significantly disadvantaged compared to national armies in terms of troops, equipment, and internal organisational structure. However, VNSAs – both state-sponsored and individually acting – are a cause of major concern for European armies and their allies around the globe.
In an age in which non-state actors threaten both the nation state’s monopoly on violence and emerge as a violent actor in international relations themselves, nation-states and their militaries need to arrive at a mutual understanding of how violent non-state actors can be countered on a strategic and operational level (Heinze/Steele 2, 2009). Therefore, it is important to have a shared definition of VNSAs as a threat to the rules-based order (Michta, 2006), and a common framework to counter terrorist acts, such as initially put forth by NATO, which defines terrorism as “a persistent global threat that knows no border, nationality or religion” and emphasises that the combat of violent non-state actors “is a challenge that the international community must tackle together” (NATO, 2021). Furthermore, it is important to understand the recruitment and armament efforts of terrorist groups, monitoring their movements and actions. It is noteworthy that intelligence capabilities should not only focus on surveillance and reconnaissance, but also the improved understanding of foreign cultures, customs, and the ideology behind terrorist groups (Corbin, 2001).
To translate strategic goals into successful counter-terrorism operations, personnel development and training are necessary. Military planners should consider that small, lightly equipped, and mobile military units under downscaled decision-making structures are better suited at countering asymmetric threats. Such units would deploy and adapt to the complexities of expeditionary, capture, or evacuation missions faster than larger units, whose movement requires greater logistical effort and who are trained to fight force-on-force battles in regional wars. For this kind of flexible response to be sustainable, interoperability among different nations and organisations is necessary, for example, between military units of countries involved in conflict management, peacekeeping units, and humanitarian operatives (Corbin, 2001).
VNSAs exploit social media and encrypted messaging apps to recruit new members, instigate violence against the public, and plan and coordinate attacks. At the same time, encrypted software becomes harder to decrypt, and the content on social media is difficult to monitor given its sheer mass. To efficiently address the exploitation of new communication technologies by VNSAs, intelligence operations need to shift their attention towards the software and the communicating parties by “outwitting the user” or “hacking the ‘ends’ of end-to-end communication” (Graham 25, 2016).
Terrorist groups increasingly professionalise their recruitment and arms acquisition strategies, showing remarkable creativity when it comes to employing new weapons and digital technologies. For instance, IS has been observed turning publicly available – and rather affordable – commercial drones designed for leisure activities into deadly weapons by simply equipping them with a grenade (Gartenstein-Ross, 2018). As the IED hostile death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2006/07 shows, this new phenomenon of aerial improvised explosive devices can inflict serious casualties on militaries and the civilian population. Currently, the response to terrorist arms acquisition efforts, including the acquisition of WMD, is too reactionary, as militaries often only become aware of their acquisition by VNSAs after they have already been used. To shift to a pre-emptive approach, preventing the acquisition of large weaponry arsenals or even WMD by VNSAs or destroying arm stockpiles, monitoring systems and information sharing-procedures need to be improved (Schmitz 17, 2020).
In conclusion, violent non-state actors and their combat tactics present traditional armies with significant challenges. To counter these diffusely organised groups, operating individually and relying on improvised devices and encryption technology, an even greater effort to interoperate is necessary. Westphalian states need to respond to the threat posed by VNSAs both on the strategic and operational level by sharing a mutual understanding of terrorism as a threat, providing militaries with relevant equipment, training, and intelligence. The terrorist threat is not bound to territory, therefore it is imperative to deepen cooperation between nation-states enhancing interoperability between militaries in training, equipment compatibility and information-sharing procedures to efficiently contain and combat it.
Written by Finabel Research Department
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