George W. Bush had arrived at the White House with a pledge, as outlined in his 1999 speech at the Citadel, to “begin creating the military of the next century” as well as to boost overall defense spending. The Afghan operation had put precision-guided bombing on display, but the revolution in military affairs held the promise of further wonders. “Millennium Challenge 2002,” the largest and most elaborate war game ever held, was accordingly designed to put the revolutionary “military of the next century” on full display. Three years in the planning, budgeted at $250 million, involving 13,500 participants waging mock war in 9 training sites across the United States as well as 17 “virtual” locations in the powerful computers of the Joint Forces Command, the exercise, to be held in the summer of 2002, enjoyed the personal attention of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld himself. As Rumsfeld declared during a visit to Joint Forces Command headquarters in Norfolk, Virginia, where the major players in the game would be based, the game would show “the progress that we have made this far in transforming to produce the combat capability necessary to meet deep threats and the challenges of the 21st Century.”
Escorting Rumsfeld round the premises, the commanding general, William Kernan, took care to keep his distinguished guest away from a tall, bald-headed man with a military bearing but clad in civilian clothes; he was the enemy. Paul Van Riper, the three-star marine general, now retired, who had poured such scorn on David Deptula’s theories in the years following Desert Storm, had been called back to command the red team in the Millennium war game. In such exercises, the enemy is always red; the U.S. side is always blue. But Van Riper was a twofold enemy; not only was he playing the role of an opponent, he also was making no secret of his contempt for the concepts underpinning the blue team’s plan for the game.
“None of it was scientifically supportable,” he told me later, after delivering a droll recitation of the full range of acronyms pumped out by the command. “They claimed to be able to understand the relationship between all nodes or links, so for example if something happened to an enemy’s economy, they could precisely calculate the effect on his military performance. They talked about crony targeting [the destruction of the property of Slobodan Milošević’s friends’ property during the Kosovo conflict in hopes of affecting his behavior] a lot.” In short, the blue plan encapsulated the core belief system of U.S. military doctrine. High-value targeting, as Van Riper was well aware, was inherent in the official doctrine’s assertions of the capabilities of effects-based operations. But given his low regard for the entire concept of “total situational awareness,” he was not unduly worried.
In the scenario designed by the exercise planners, Van Riper was playing the role of a rogue military commander somewhere in the Persian Gulf who was willfully confronting the United States. Though there were thousands of troops as well as planes and ships taking part in the game across the country, much of the action would be “virtual,” occurring in computers and displayed on monitors. It was to be the ultimate video game. Needless to say, each of the services foresaw a useful role for their expanding fleets of drones as well as for other novel systems.
Among the digital tools available to the blue team was an enormous database labeled Operational Net Assessment (ONA), which they believed contained everything they needed to know about their opponent and how he would behave. But they did not even know what he looked like. The blue commander, a three-star army general, worked in full uniform, surrounded by his extensive staff. As the game was getting under way, Van Riper, dressed in casual civilian clothes, took a stroll, unrecognized, through the blue team headquarters area to take the measure of his opponent. With his own staff, he was informal, though he forbade the use of acronyms. “We’ll all speak English here,” he told them.
In the first hours of the war, the blue team knocked out Van Riper’s fiber-optic communications, confidently expecting that he would now be forced to use radio links, which could be easily intercepted. He refused to cooperate, however, turning instead to motorcycle couriers and coded messages in the calls to prayer from the mosques in preparing his own attack. He was no longer performing an assigned part in a scripted play. Van Riper had become a real, bloody-minded, Middle Eastern enemy who had no intention of playing by the rules and was determined to win.
Just a month earlier, the Bush administration had unveiled a new national security policy of preemptive attacks, justified as “our inherent right of self-defense.” So, when a blue team carrier task force loaded with troops steamed into the Gulf (at least in the computer simulation) and took up station off the coast of his territory, Van Riper assumed that they were going to follow the new policy and attack him without warning. “I decided to preempt the preempter,” he told me. Oddly enough, the blue general sensed this, saying: “I have a feeling that Red is going to strike,” but his staff was quick to assure him that their ONA made it clear that this could not happen.
Van Riper was well aware of the U.S. Navy’s Aegis antimissile capabilities and of how many missiles it would take to overwhelm them. “Usually Red hoards its missiles, letting them out in dribs and drabs,” he told me in retracing the battle. “That’s foolish, I did a salvo launch, used up pretty much all my inventory at once.” The defenses were overwhelmed. Sixteen virtual American ships sank to the bottom of the Gulf, along with twenty thousand virtual servicemen. Only a few days in, the war was over, and the twenty-first-century U.S. military had been beaten hands down. Van Riper, who had been an attentive student of the theories of John Boyd, the fighter pilot and theoretician of conflict, won by adapting quickly and imaginatively to changing circumstances (such as his use of motorcycle messengers and calls from the minarets of mosques when his phone links were destroyed). In contrast, his opponent’s rigid “effects-based” approach had locked him into a preset vision of how the battle would play out.
For General Kernan, the Joint Forces commander, there could be only one solution to this crisis. Van Riper was informed that the sunken ships had magically refloated themselves, the dead had come back to life, and the war was on again. But this time there would be no surprises. He was not allowed to shoot down vulnerable blue team V-22 troop transports. The red team was ordered to switch on their radars so that they could be more easily detected and destroyed. The umpires announced that all of the red team’s missile strikes had been intercepted. The game was now unashamedly rigged to ensure a U.S. victory as well as validation of the new theories. Van Riper resigned in disgust as red leader but stayed on to monitor the predictable rout of his forces under these new conditions. Afterward he wrote a scathing report, documenting how the exercise had been rigged and by whom, but no outsider could read it because it was promptly classified.
Undaunted, in the very next real war, the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the U.S. military deployed many of the same concepts recently deployed in the Millennium Challenge. Initially, things appeared to go well. The invasion was planned strictly in accordance with the concept of rapid dominance, defined as “near total or absolute knowledge and understanding of self, adversary, and environment; rapidity and timeliness in application; operational brilliance in execution; and [near] total control and signature management of the entire operational environment.” This happy state being achieved, the enemy must inevitably be reduced to a state of “shock and awe.”
Decapitation fit neatly into this approach, indicating that the planners misunderstood how useful it would be to keep Saddam alive and in command of enemy forces. According to a postwar Pentagon assessment, “The largest contributing factor to the complete defeat of Iraq’s military forces was the continued interference by Saddam (Hussein),” posthumously affirming the argument advanced by British intelligence officer Lieutenant Colonel Thornley against killing Hitler in 1944 on the grounds that the Nazi leader’s blunders were of inestimable help to the Allied cause. Nonetheless, despite Saddam’s previous demonstrations of military incompetence during the 1991 war and before, the U.S. pursued a decapitation strategy to an almost obsessive degree. Attempts to kill the Iraqi leader in 1991 had been lightly cloaked in euphemism, but this time there was little such pretense.
In the first minutes of the war a fusillade of bombs and no less than forty cruise missiles rained down on a collection of farm buildings on the outskirts of Baghdad, prompted by a CIA report that Saddam and his sons were lurking there in an underground bunker. Early reports were optimistic. “We were sure we’d got him,” one of the targeting team told me. “Cheney came out and said he was dead. It took us three days before we were sure he had survived.” In fact, neither Saddam nor either of his sons had been at the farm. Nor did it have a bunker.
The effort was coordinated by a High-Value Target Cell in the Pentagon, an elaboration of the system that had tracked Milošević in 1999. The office coordinated other such cells at CIA, NSA, and Centcom, the military command overseeing the Iraq and Afghan wars. “Between 1999 and 2002 it was growing into a new science,” a Pentagon analyst formerly assigned to the operation told me. “If you’re doing HVT, on Saddam Hussein, for example, you have to know where he is at all times, who are his security retinue, where they are. You look for patterns, but our predictive ability was low. We got very, very good on where he had been; sometimes we knew where he was. But predicting where he would be, that was hard, and we needed that because at that time the kill chain, the time between getting the intelligence and the bomb or missile impacting, was too long, a minimum of forty minutes, and often more. The shortest kill chain we managed in the 2003 war was forty-five minutes,” the analyst recalled. “That was the strike on the al-Saath restaurant in Baghdad. We thought that Saddam was there. He wasn’t, but we did kill a bunch of civilians.”
“I did not know who was there. I really didn’t care,” Colonel Fred Swan, weapons officer on the B-1 bomber that hit the restaurant, later told reporters. “We’ve got to get the bombs on target. We’ve got to make a lot of things happen to make that happen. So you just fall totally into execute mode and kill the target.”
Drones, with their ability to wait and watch for a target to appear and then launch a missile can, at least in theory, shrink the kill chain almost to zero. “But that means you’re taking the decision on the fly, with no time to really assess potential collateral damage, like who else is in the house or whatever,” the former inmate of the High-Value Target Cell pointed out to me.
The former specialist raised another occupational hazard of this particular strategy: the difficulty of assessing success. “After that first strike, it took three days before we knew for certain he wasn’t dead. Even when he appeared on TV, sitting at a desk, reading a speech, with glasses on, a lot of people in the office were saying ‘It’s not him, it’s a double,’ or even suggesting it was prerecorded earlier in case he got hit. We even had analysts going over the video to see if the angle of light in the window was right for that time of year.”
Precision strikes were targeted over the ensuing weeks of the invasion on the purported lairs of various Iraqi commanders, though without success. According to the former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst Marc Garlasco, the United States selected fifty specific “high-value individuals” to be targeted and killed during the invasion. All survived. Not so lucky were the “couple of hundred civilians, at least,” according to Garlasco, who were killed in the strikes. Many of them may have died thanks to what appeared to be an ingenious innovation in targeting technology. The war coincided with the introduction in the Middle East of a new model of satellite phone for civilians, the Thuraya. Unlike its unwieldy predecessors, this device, about the size of an old-fashioned telephone handset, could be easily carried and used, and it was believed that many of the fugitive Iraqi leadership carried them. Like all such devices, the Thuraya inevitably transmitted information regarding its location, thus providing a convenient mark for GPS-guided bombs. In effect, the target would be guiding the bomb that killed him. But there was a flaw: the Thuraya’s GPS system was not so precise in fixing its position and was accurate only within a 100-meter (109-yard) distance, which meant that the bomb could land anywhere within an area of 37,500 square yards. This was lucky for the target but not so lucky for innocent passersby who happened to be in that area. In other words, as a Human Rights Watch report subsequently observed, innovative technology had turned “a precision weapon into a potentially indiscriminate weapon.”
The United States was not unmindful of collateral damage, going to some lengths to preserve a degree of proportion. Regulations stipulated that civilians could be killed but not too many, at least not without clearance from higher authority. “Our number was thirty,” explained Garlasco. “So, for example, Saddam Hussein. If you’re gonna kill up to twenty-nine people in a strike against Saddam Hussein, that’s not a problem. But once you hit that number thirty, we actually had to go to either President Bush, or Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.” As it happened, approval from higher authority was pretty much pro forma; following the invasion, General Michael Moseley, then vice chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force, reported that the necessary clearance to risk thirty or more civilian lives in this manner had been requested at least fifty times. In no case had it been refused.
Following the defeat of the Iraqi military and the installation of the occupation regime in Baghdad, the manhunt for Saddam continued. Spurring such efforts was the widespread belief that the source of the escalating insurgency was the deposed leader and his diehard followers. So when he was finally run to ground on December 13, 2003, his capture inevitably monitored in real time via Predator by generals at their U.S. headquarters, hope blossomed that resistance might now begin to taper off. As Colonel Jim Hickey, the Chicago-born leader of the unit that unearthed Saddam, remarked the day after his capture, “From a military point of view, if you lop the head off a snake, the snake’s not going to be so viable after that.”
But that turned out not to be the case.
At the end of March 2004, four employees of the Blackwater military contractor corporation were ambushed and killed in the town of Fallujah, their incinerated bodies strung up for all to see. Meanwhile the popular Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr threatened to ignite an uprising among the previously quiescent Shia population. All the while, the number of lethal attacks with homemade bombs against American soldiers had been ticking remorselessly upward. The mounting chaos sparked a heated reaction in Washington, where the administration had hitherto believed that the insurgency was largely the last gasp of Saddam’s defeated regime. On April 7, a week after the Fallujah ambush, Bush, Rumsfeld, and Secretary of State Colin Powell held a videoconference with General Ricardo Sanchez, the overall commander in Iraq. As later related by Sanchez himself, Powell (often cited as the cerebral moderate in that administration) set an emotional tone, declaring: “We’ve got to smash somebody’s ass quickly. There has to be a total victory somewhere. We must have a brute demonstration of power.” As Sanchez recalled, the meeting became even more bellicose. “Kick ass!” exclaimed the president. “If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell!… There is a series of moments, and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!”
That same month the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, General Stanley McChrystal, moved his headquarters to Iraq. As in the unhappy saga of Task Force 11 at Takur Ghar, the elite JSOC had been active in Afghanistan. McChrystal himself, though not directly engaged in Special Operations there, had been the aggressive chief of staff of Combined Joint Task Force 180, which according to a later report by officers who served in it, had conducted its affairs according to the principles of effects-based operations, defined in a military publication as “producing desired futures.” The principal effect of these operations was of course to embitter the population. Thanks to a steady surge of ill-judged arrests and incarcerations, the Taliban was reviving.
In Iraq, JSOC components such as the elite Army Delta Force and Navy Seal Team 6 had been initially engaged in rounding up the “deck of cards,” the leading officials of Saddam Hussein’s defeated regime whose names and faces had been printed up by the Pentagon as playing cards and distributed to soldiers before the invasion. But that was about to change. A new kingpin had appeared on the scene, a suitable candidate to succeed Saddam as the advertised source of all evil in occupied Iraq.
The Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (a nom de guerre, his real name being Ahmad Fadeel al-Nazal al-Khalayleh) had been a petty criminal in his native country before moving to Afghanistan, arriving too late to join the anti-Soviet jihad but staying on to train with members of al-Qaeda. In early 2003, he was plucked from obscurity by Secretary Powell, who, in his notorious UN address justifying the upcoming attack on Iraq, singled out Zarqawi as the link (nonexistent in reality) between Saddam and al-Qaeda.
A gifted organizer and propagandist, Zarqawi appreciated that self-promotion, as a ruthless champion of fundamentalism, would attract funds and recruits to his banner. In May 2004, a gruesome video appeared online with the caption “Abu Musab Al Zarqawi slaughters an American,” the American in question being Nicholas Berg, an independent civilian contractor kidnapped in Baghdad the month before whose head Zarqawi sawed off with a carving knife for the benefit of the camera. This and other videos had wide distribution and impact thanks to one of the occupation’s few success stories, the construction of cell-phone networks in Iraq, none of which had existed in the old regime. Inaugurated in February 2004, the Egyptian-owned Iraqna network, which covered Baghdad and central Iraq, was soon attracting subscribers at the rate of 100,000 a month. Insurgents rapidly adopted it as a tool for detonating bombs, while Zarqawi and others utilized its potential for communication and propaganda. Soon, it would become the most essential tool in the U.S. counterinsurgency arsenal.
Thanks to his carefully crafted public relations campaign, Zarqawi was soon cast in Saddam’s old role in U.S. demonology. In many ways he was ideally suited for the part. Along with his evident psychopathic cruelty, his former association with al-Qaeda bolstered the notion that Iraq and 9/11 were somehow linked, while his foreign origins and the foreign volunteers in his group could be taken as demonstrating that the insurgency was the work of international terrorists, not disaffected Iraqis. To guarantee his high-value status as the cause of all ills, beginning in 2004 the U.S. military mounted a propaganda campaign aimed not only at Iraqis but also at Americans: internal military documents cited the “U.S. Home Audience” as one of the targets of the campaign.
Paradoxically, having created a larger-than-life high-value target, the military command themselves came to believe in it. By 2005, according to a British report, Zarqawi was dominating the command’s thinking about the war almost to the point of obsession. A participant at the two morning videoconferences held by General George Casey (who replaced Sanchez in June 2004) reported: “[I]t was mentioned every morning [in both venues] in the mistaken belief that if you got him the insurgency would collapse.”
Marketed as a master-terrorist, Zarqawi was an ideal target for Joint Special Operations Command and its ambitious commander. Rapidly jettisoning the redundant “deck-of-cards” targets, McChrystal set to work reorganizing his command for a confrontation with the foe. JSOC moved out of its initial Camp Nama headquarters at Baghdad airport, where investigators had discovered prisoners being tortured with electric shocks and held in cells the size of dog kennels, to a new headquarters at Balad, the sprawling air force base forty miles from the capital. Impatient with the cumbersome system by which intelligence collected by the elite Delta Force, SEAL, and Ranger units was shipped off elsewhere for analysis, he promoted a “flattened” system in which intelligence was analyzed on the spot and acted on immediately, producing further intelligence for instant analysis, and so on. Communal spirit among the headquarters staff was enhanced by the new working space, a single large room without partitions, in which everyone could watch the fruits of their efforts on “Kill TV,” large plasma screens on the office wall streaming video footage of air strikes and raiding parties in action. It was a very self-contained operational headquarters, with all components of the JSOC machine, including aircraft and helicopters as well as the men of the elite special operations units, together in one facility. Prisoners were also housed there, although for some time British special operations units were forbidden to hand over any prisoners to McChrystal’s command on the grounds that prisoners at the new headquarters were again being held in “tiny” dog kennels.
The operation ran twenty-four/seven, three shifts a day. Although he was a two-star general overseeing a far-flung operation, McChrystal immersed himself in the day-to-day battle, working right next to officers, planning and directing the night’s raids, and often accompanying them himself. A videoconference, starring the general—one camera was trained on McChrystal throughout—and linking thousands of people across the globe, from intelligence agencies in Washington (timed to suit their convenience) to forward-operating bases in the mountains of Afghanistan, occupied several hours of his day and consumed unimaginable amounts of bandwidth. By 2007, writes McChrystal in his memoir: “[T]he O&I (operations and intelligence) was a worldwide forum of thousands of people associated with our mission.”
This was indeed net-centric warfare in action, complete with all the esoteric (and costly) technology associated with the concept. The underlying premises of the revolution in military affairs had been that information is the key to victory and that it is possible to have near-perfect intelligence concerning the enemy, thereby enabling precise military operations, including the targeting of precision weapons with accurately predicted effects. Tellingly, McChrystal, at that time and since, liked to repeat the mantra “it takes a network to defeat a network,” referencing the theories propounded by think tankers John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, academic popularizers of “netwar” and staunch adherents of Andrew Marshall and the revolution.
Successful net warriors of course demand “information dominance” (Arquilla served as a Pentagon adviser in that field during the Kosovo conflict). But despite repeated promises, such high-level target intelligence never quite materialized, as had been apparent in Vietnam, 1991 Iraq, and the Balkans. The arrival of the cell phone in war zones held out the prospect of a giant leap forward, rendering it possible, in theory at least, to map the enemy network, to determine desirable targets, and to target them. In the days of Task Force Alpha, sensors were distributed across the landscape in hopes that they would detect the enemy and signal his whereabouts. Later, as with JSTARS, the sensors became airborne. Now the enemy was obligingly carrying their own sensors—cell phones—with them at all times, not only continually broadcasting their location but also continually updating connections among individuals in the target network: who was calling whom, how often, who got the most calls, and so on.
In the 1990s the leadership of the Drug Enforcement Agency had forged a profitable relationship with the National Security Agency following its adoption of the kingpin strategy. JSOC under McChrystal’s command similarly turned to the powerful National Security Agency, exploiting its technological resources and bureaucratic clout. NSA, under the ambitious command of General Keith Alexander, responded readily, instituting a program called Real Time Regional Gateway to collect every Iraqi text message, phone call, and email on the principle that it was better to “collect the whole haystack” rather than look for a single needle.
No less prized than the actual recordings was the “metadata” of all calls made and received. So-called traffic analysis has long been an intelligence tool: the British, for example, used it in World War II to track German submarines via their radio transmissions even when unable to read the actual messages. Now, computer-aided analysis made it possible to display instantly patterns of communication within the relevant population. By looking at these links it supposedly became possible to construct intricate diagrams of the enemy network.
First, however, it was obviously essential to find out people’s phone numbers. Zarqawi was unlikely to list his number in the phone book, and neither would anyone else of interest. That was where a classified technology developed by NSA and known by a variety of names, including Triggerfish, Stingray, and IMSI Catcher, was introduced. These devices in essence mimic a cell tower, getting a cell phone or cell phones, even when several kilometers away, to connect and thereby reveal the respective number(s) and location(s). Portable (very little power is needed to override the real tower’s signals) and functioning even when the targeted phones are inside buildings, this technology rapidly became central to JSOC’s manhunts. “It’s simple,” a former intelligence operative in Iraq explained. “I’ve walked past buildings with the device in my backpack and scooped up the numbers of all the people inside. So you have the numbers. Then, later, when we went to get one of those people, the device pings his phone and tells us where he is.” The devices, also known generically as “virtual base-tower receivers,” could be carried not only by a person or vehicle but also in a pod mounted on a drone.
The implications of these developments in tracking technology were thrilling, at least to the NSA and its partners. An NSA document dated March 3, 2005, and later released by the whistle-blower Edward Snowden asks rhetorically:
What resembles “LITTLE BOY” [one of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan during World war II] and as LITTLE BOY did, represents the dawn of a new era (at least in SIGINT and precision geolocation)?
If you answered a pod mounted on an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) that is currently flying in support of the Global War on Terrorism, you would be correct.
If and when everything worked as planned, the drones would not only help locate targets via their cell phones but also stream video of them and their locations before they finally broadcast dramatic imagery of their destruction for screening to an appreciative audience on Kill TV. But of course things did not always go as planned. Clearly, a lot depended on the phone being correctly associated with the target. But the target might easily have passed his phone on to someone else, or the original link between phone and person could be in error.
Technology, whether in the form of signals intelligence or pictures, was always central to JSOC, whether in Afghanistan or Iraq. Artful jockeying of high-level connections back in Washington ensured McChrystal a disproportionate share of technical resources: at one point the entire non-JSOC U.S. force in Iraq had just one Predator drone for all purposes. The forceful Irishman, Michael Flynn, McChrystal’s intelligence chief, elevated this hoarding of resources to a matter of doctrine, claiming that “Intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance [predominantly drones] are most effective against low-contrast enemies (i.e. people) when massed.… It is not enough to have several eyes on a target—several eyes are needed on a target for a long period.” By these statements he meant that he needed three Predator drones watching a target 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Given that 168 support staffers were required to keep one Predator 24-hour Combat Air Patrol in the air, this was clearly an expensive undertaking.
A high-ranking British visitor to JSOC’s Balad operation commented that it smacked of “industrial counterterrorism.” He did not mean it as a compliment, but many in the system took it as one. Some spoke approvingly of the “machine.” McChrystal himself could wax lyrical about his creation. Reminiscing years later about happy days at Balad, he described his impressions thus:
… as night fell, the operations center hummed with serious, focused activity. Soon, the rumble of helicopters and aircraft, some throaty, some a high whine, bounced across the darkened gravel and off the cement walls and barriers of our compound. The sound grew in layers, building like a chorus singing a round, as one set of rotors, propellers, or jet engines came alive, joined the cacophony, and then departed the airfield. Gradually, the chorus dissipated until silence returned to the darkened base.
The entire operation was very self-contained and secretive, with little news seeping into the outside world of what was going on apart from discreet references by privileged insiders. Even other components of the occupation regime were largely left in ignorance; McChrystal communicated with the regular forces only at the highest level. A “flimsy” (a printed message on a secure fax) would arrive each morning in the Baghdad military headquarters’ SCIF (Secure Compartmented Information Facility), the repository for especially secret material detailing the previous night’s JSOC raids. The paper had to be destroyed in the classified shredder by noon at the latest. “It was bad stuff,” said one former inmate of the SCIF who made a point of perusing these short-lived documents. “They were really running riot, shooting up rooms-full of people, massacring families, night after night after night.”
Such mayhem denoted what McChrystal later described as an artful shift in strategy. Despite the resources directed against him, Zarqawi had survived and expanded his operations, helping to kill hundreds of Shia in suicide bomb attacks and most dramatically blowing up the much-venerated Al-Askar Shi’ite shrine in Samarra in February 2006. The revised JSOC strategy, according to McChrystal, was to “disembowel the organization by targeting its midlevel commanders. They ran AQI day to day and retained the institutional wisdom for operations. By hollowing out its midsection, we believed we could get the organization to collapse on itself.”
Such an approach indicated the influence of social network analysis, a fast-growing discipline in the world of counterterrorism in which esoteric algorithms were deployed to probe the structure and dynamics of enemy organizations. A leading pioneer had been the mathematician and social scientist Valdis Krebs, who deployed such analysis on the 9/11 hijackers’ relationships with each other to demonstrate, by using elaborate diagrams, that their conspiracy was undetected because they adopted a low profile and kept to themselves. Central to this approach was the focus on what was called relational analysis—the links between different “nodes” rather than “attributes”—meaning who or what these nodes actually were (so heaven help a pizza-delivery store owner getting a lot of calls from a terrorist cell). Thanks to such studies, the business of assassination, or targeted killing, could move beyond a crude fixation with killing enemy leaders to more elaborate scenarios for “shaping” the enemy network by killing carefully selected individuals whose elimination would make the entire structure more fragile and thus easier to disrupt. This theoretical approach was becoming ever more fashionable, spreading into every nook and cranny of the national security apparatus. A classified study commissioned by the Pentagon’s Strategic Command in 2008 found that there were no less than “185 separate Attack the Network efforts across the military that are not consolidated, centralized, or coordinated.” The study’s authors referred to this structure as “ad-hocracy.”
Following such an operation, the social network charts, based on the intelligence monitoring of the network’s phone links, showed the disappearance of such links, indicating that the network had been disrupted. But the vanished links might have been equally likely indications that survivors had sensibly concluded that they should stay away from the phone and find some other way to get in touch. The network had not fragmented, even though it might have looked as if it had on intelligence diagrams of the network, which of course showed only those links known to intelligence. As Keith Dear, a Royal Air Force intelligence officer formerly serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, has acutely pointed out: “Targeted killing is often justified by the display of a social network chart before and after a targeted killing in order to explain how the group fragmented.” But, he explained, the charts ignored the fact that the group was probably using other ways to communicate. “The illusion that they fragment is based on the acceptance of the abstraction [of the chart] as reality.”
While the happy operation at Balad was doing its work, another campaign was under way to promote the notion that the United States could turn the tide of the war by adopting COIN, a doctrine of counterinsurgency that emphasized the cultivation of popular support as an essential tool. David Petraeus, the ambitious officer who parlayed COIN as a means to a rapid ascent through the ranks, succeeded in enshrining its precepts into an official U.S. Army Field Manual, FM3-24, published to rapturous public acclaim in December 2006. In the section devoted to “targeting,” intelligence analysts are required to identify “targets to isolate from the population, and targets to eliminate … the targeting board produces a prioritized list of targets and a recommended course of action appropriate with each.”
McChrystal’s shift to targeting midlevel commanders would appear to have rested on this sort of carefully considered approach. However, as a former Pentagon analyst with an institutional memory stretching back to the days of the Phoenix program observed to me with some amusement, “You could suggest any set of targets and say their loss would collapse the organization—low level, middle level, top level, it can all be made to seem equally valid. In the end it always comes down to this: the poor sap with the most links gets iced!” Seeking to verify such a cynical conclusion, I asked a JSOC veteran who had worked closely with McChrystal in Iraq if there had indeed been a thought-out plan as to whom to target, with careful consideration of how that would affect the enemy network. “No,” he replied after pondering the matter for a few seconds, “it was all kind of ad hoc.” Fundamentally, McChrystal’s campaign was following the same trajectory of previous “critical node” campaigns stretching back to the strategic bombing of Germany in World War II.
Ultimately, Zarqawi was run to earth and killed, though largely thanks to old-fashioned human intelligence rather than elaborate technology. His isolated safe house, located thanks to a tip-off, was hit with two precision-guided 500-pound bombs, shortly after which he expired. At the subsequent press briefing the military displayed a twice life-size matte photo-portrait of the dead jihadi in a large gilt frame that reminded some who viewed it of a hunting trophy. President Bush, who had promoted McChrystal to three-star rank in February, called with congratulations. The New York Post headlined “Gotcha!” and Newsweek, in its cover story, speculated that Zarqawi’s demise might be a “turning point in the long, frustrating war on terror.”
“Things changed when we got Zarqawi,” the former Pentagon-based specialist in high-value targeting told me. “Morale was getting a little low, at least in the military, up to that point. There was a kind of fatigue setting in—I remember people were saying ‘It’s always failing, maybe it’s not worth it.’ After all, we’d had fifty HVTs on the Iraq blacklist in 2003 and hadn’t killed a single one of them. We hadn’t gotten Osama bin Laden, or Mullah Omar. So Zarqawi was the first really high-value guy we got, and we had several successes shortly after that. Zarqawi—that was when it changed.”
A week after their leader’s death, al-Qaeda in Iraq named his successor, an Egyptian with an impressive jihadi record named Abu Ayyub al-Masri.
Zarqawi had been dangerous. Al-Masri was worse.
Whereas Zarqawi, as a former associate told American interrogators, had the prime goal of fighting for the Sunnis in Iraq, al-Masri saw Iraq as only part of a wider war against the West. Al-Masri repaired relations with al-Qaeda’s distant senior leadership in Pakistan, boosted his group’s revenues from various criminal enterprises, and cracked down on careless cell-phone use. He insisted on truthful reports from subordinates and improved the group’s digital operations. Suicide bombers were put to work editing and uploading propaganda videos while they waited to carry out their terminal mission. IED attacks and American casualties went into a steep upward curve.
The U.S. military did not mount a propaganda operation to raise al-Masri’s profile.