Military Strategy by Antulio J. Echevarria II

Author:Antulio J. Echevarria II
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780199340156
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2016-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

Terror and terrorism

“Terror is a psychological weapon of unbelievable power,” claimed Jacques Soustelle, the governor general of Algeria during its bloody war of independence (1954–1962). “Before the bodies of those whose throats have been cut and the grimacing faces of the mutilated,” he continued, “all capacity for resistance lapses; the spring is broken.” More than one million people lost their lives in the Algerian conflict, though terror was not the only weapon responsible. The use of terror typically takes one of two forms: either wholesale, indiscriminate bombing designed to break civilian morale, as with the strategic bombing campaigns of the Second World War, or selective, precise targeting, as with the political assassinations carried out by Algerian nationalists during their war of independence. Terror and terrorism are military strategies largely because of their coercive power. They are used to break an opponent’s willingness to fight or to induce a change in a rival power’s policies or behavior. Terrorists usually choose their targets for psychological value rather than for material gain. In fact, a terror attack may cause little harm to a party’s physical capacity to fight. Terror is not just a military strategy; criminal gangs and drug cartels often use it to protect their respective operations and to send warnings to their rivals. While the use of terror to coerce or intimidate may be as old as human society, it certainly appears more prevalent in the age of digital communications since the effects of every act of terror can reach a global audience the instant they occur.

If terror is little more than the use of violence to instill a crippling sense of fear, as Soustelle described, terrorism itself is more difficult to define. Official definitions of terrorism describe it as violence (discriminate or otherwise) directed against noncombatants to influence public opinion or to modify a government’s policies. The U.S. Department of State, for instance, defines terrorism as “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents.” However, as is often said, one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter. That was certainly true of Nelson Mandela, who became South Africa’s first black president and helped abolish apartheid but not before being roundly condemned as a terrorist and enduring more than a quarter century as a political prisoner. Many militant groups—such as the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the Basque Homeland and Liberty (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, or ETA), the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or FARC), and Hamas, Hezbollah, and al-Qaeda—have been identified as terrorist organizations, but of course they see themselves differently. In fact, distinguishing an act of terror from an act of resistance, or from an act of war, can depend almost entirely on one’s point of view.

Some experts see terrorism as a tactic, a set of techniques, rather than a type of strategy. To be sure, in many cases that is true. Between 66 and 73 ce, the Jewish Sicarii (dagger-assassins) in Jerusalem killed high-profile religious and political figures who were thought to be loyal to the Romans.

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