Last Friday at an event in Washington D.C., U.S. military personnel who were at the forefront of counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq joined Slate Magazine's Chris Wilson at the New America Foundation to discuss the role of social networking theories in modern combat. While Bin Laden doesn't tweet and there may not be an al-Qaida fanpage on Facebook that can be browsed for intel, the experts agreed that understanding the other side's social networks -- as painstaking as the process may be -- can be crucial to operational success.
Studying social networks in Iraq yielded some high profile successes for American forces, event participants said. Col. Jim Hickey, who commanded the 1st Brigade Combat Team in the Fourth Infantry Division that captured Saddam, explained that Hussein's inner circle was cracked when military commanders quickly realized that Iraqi social networks were based on family ties. Focusing on the elite families based in Hussein's hometown of Tikrit eventually led American forces to his hideout -- the infamous farmhouse spiderhole located just outside the city.
The finding and killing of al-Qaida leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was also made possible because of social network intelligence, according to Matthew Alexander, (the pseudonym of) an interrogator who played a prominent role in the affair. He recalled the story of Tariq, a captured insurgent commander who gave up crucial information about foreign fighters in Iraq that eventually lead US forces to al-Zarqawi. Alexander tricked Tariq into thinking that one of his subordinates had ratted him out as the group's leader. Because his Middle Eastern cultural sensibilities were upset by the fabricated revelation -- hierarchies are far more rigid in Arab societies -- he subsequently decided to go on a bean-spilling rampage, which Alexander said would not have been possible without knowledge of how Arabic social networks function (interestingly, Alexander said that his crafty approach on Tariq worked far better than his colleagues' hardline efforts and added that it is an insult to interrogators to assume that they need “enhanced interrogation” to get the job done, assuming that it even works).
Despite the success stories, the panel was keen to stress that social network theory can only help the military so much. Al-Qaida's social networks, for example, are extremely complex and have proven to be hard to crack. Leaders take on different roles, and their network is dynamic, if not amorphous. Alexander likened a map of Al-Qaida's network to a plate of spaghetti and meatballs smashed on the kitchen floor.
And despite the recent phenomenon of online social networking, social network theory has been studied by armies long before the advent of the Internet, who ended up losing to the very network they were trying to disrupt. The Nazis attempted to map the social networks of Allied pilots in World War II. In Vietnam, the U.S. military studied the Vietcong's social networks, and the French cracked the FLN's social network in Algeria's war for independence (chronicled in the historically accurate film, The Battle of Algiers), but eventually lost the war.
The problem with focusing too much attention on social network disruption, said Scott Helfstein, Ph.D., an assistant professor and social scientist at West Point, is that social networks are structurally resilient. Understanding them can be useful for certain scenarios, such as manhunting. But knowledge of militants' social networks alone won't stop them from operating. As long as disaffected people have an an ideological justification to fight, militants will emerge, Helfstein said. Knowing how they interact with each other can at least make it extremely difficult for them to carry out attacks.
Listen to an mp3 of the panel discussion at the New America Foundation.
Read Chris Wilson's five part series on Slate, which details how social networking theories were used to capture former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.