No Sympathy for the Devil: Searching for a New Operational Doctrine to Guide Military Response to Terrorism

Abstract

This paper has stopped short of fleshing out a full operations-to-tactics link for counterterrorist operations, or to fully outline a new structure to integrate civilian and military counterterrorist capabilities. These are two areas where more work needs to be done than we have hands doing it I am convinced the scenarios laid out at the beginning of this paper will become reality in the not too distant future. Our tendency to be in "denial" about terrorism and to treat it as a criminal act finesses the fact that criminals do not generally document their movements and build networks of political, medical, technological and financial support the way that terrorist groups do. This might suggest that the Italian Mafia or Russian Mafia are borderline terrorist organizations, and indeed they may be. But we need greater precision in our operational definitions to know who the enemy is and how to fight him

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 1997
Accession Number
ADA443825

Entities

People

  • Frank J. Young

Organizations

  • National War College

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical
  • C4I
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Human Systems
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Antiterrorism
  • Backup Systems
  • Command And Control
  • Counterterrorism
  • Doctrine
  • Employment
  • Governments
  • Law Enforcement
  • Local Governments
  • Military Strategy
  • National Security
  • Societies
  • Terrorism
  • Terrorists
  • War Colleges
  • Warfare
  • Weapons Of Mass Destruction

Readers

  • Educational Psychology
  • Military History of the United States in the 20th Century.
  • Strategic Security Studies