Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, ANU, and a Research Associate and Lecturer at the University of Canberra.
This month, Four Corners, a long-running Australian current affairs program, aired a report critical of a coalition-wide “kill-capture strategy” in Afghanistan. Although the terminology was wrong, the report, which mostly focused on High-Value Targeting (HVT), presented some conventional assumptions about HVT as a technique in contemporary conflict: mainly, that it doesn’t work.
There are two schools of thought about why HVT raids are unsuccessful. The first is that the incidental harm caused to the civilian population by HVT raids is hierarchical organisations - typified by organised crime networks - and not insurgent or terrorist networks, which tend to be more structurally decentralised. Both claims are wrong.
The first criticism of HVT contains an implicit assumption that, because the raids are ineffective, any harm caused to civilians is protecting civilians from harm, but causing some harm is inevitable no matter the context. The general emphasis in COIN is to minimise incidental harm relative to the military gain, and HVT, when done properly, has the potential to do this reasonably well.
When compared with large scale patrols in urban areas, such as cordon and search operations in Baghdad during the 2007 surge, HVT substantially diminishes contact between military forces and the population. Furthermore, HVT relies to a greater extent on the precise use of intelligence and, ultimately, directed force against a specific target. In this regard, HVT has become, in a many ways, land warfare’s equivalent of precision-guided munitions.
The second criticism of HVT takes an overly narrow view of the technique and its aims. In this view, HVT is all about removing the leadership of an organisation, thereby disrupting the decision-making process and sewing disarray at the lower levels of the organisation where guidance is most needed. This may be the Hollywood conception of targeted assassinations, but the reality of HVT is somewhat different.
The mistake hinges on our misunderstanding of organisational structure. Hierarchical organisations are often assumed to be less resilient, and therefore more susceptible to HVT, than decentralised networks, which often seem harder to penetrate and almost impervious to assault. In fact, the opposite is true. Loose networks may actually be more susceptible to the technique than hierarchies, for two reasons.
Firstly, hierarchies have a well-entrenched organising principle that allows for easy succession, something that loose social networks often lack. Secondly, social networks are based on trade-off between secrecy and efficiency (and sometimes effectiveness) which greatly diminishes the restorative capacity of the network.
Secretive networks concentrate around highly interconnected individuals who often bridge gaps in otherwise insular cells. One example of this is the Jemaah Islamiyah cell that conducted the 2002 Bali Bombings. A core 9/11 cell, which was even more secretive than the JI cell, indicates that many of the terrorists involved in the attack did not know each other and that the removal of key individuals may have made the level of organisation required to stage the attacks impossible.
The additional advantage in targeting highly connected individuals is that, if captured, they are able to expose many areas of the organisation. Even if highly connected individuals aren’t captured in the first place, they are at much greater risk of detection, since they are known to the largest number of people across the network.
In a hierarchical organisaiton, by contrast, leaders work their way “up the ladder”, while individual branches are kept separate from each other to avoid being compromised. Networks have similar protections in the form of isolated cells, but often centre on fewer, more connected and therefore more vulnerable handlers.
HVT raids have local insurgent leaders and targeting highly connected facilitators whose relationships could compromise large portions of a network. The implication is that tailoring HVT to the removal of intermediaries who enable transfer of materials, weapons, intelligence and personnel may have a more substantial impact on the network, degrading its capacity to operate regardless of leadership.
Guest Author
