Guerrilla 2.0: Asymmetric warfare in the tech era

Asym­met­ric­al war­fare pits a state and its con­ven­tion­al forces against non-state entit­ies: guer­rilla fight­ers, ter­ror­ists, crim­in­als and drug traf­fick­ers. Some of these entit­ies act on their own behalf, while oth­ers act on behalf of oth­er states in what is known as sur­rog­ate warfare.

Mil­it­ary strategy has long been inter­ested in divided groups; the Span­ish against Napoleon’s armies, res­ist­ance fight­ers dur­ing World War II, or Chinese com­mun­ists in the late 1940s, who were able to defeat forces which were, on paper, much more power­ful than they.

This ‘asym­met­ric­al’ war­fare, which for a long time was the excep­tion, is now becom­ing the norm. In a speech at the French Insti­tute of Inter­na­tion­al Rela­tions in 2007, Gen­er­al Bern­ard Thor­ette, former Chief of Staff of the French Army, explained: « Large, con­ven­tion­al, head-on battles have giv­en way to mul­tiple, repeated engage­ments on a lower scale… this does not mean how­ever mean low intens­ity. Our armed forces are now faced with frag­men­ted, even atom­ised, states and soci­et­ies, and with a com­plex rami­fic­a­tion, that encour­age the emer­gence of small, determ­ined groups. The res­ult is an almost sys­tem­at­ic asym­metry of threats. These threats are not neces­sar­ily prim­it­ive, far from it, as shown by the wide­spread use of IEDs (Impro­vised Explos­ive Devices) in sta­bil­isa­tion operations.”

Our armed forces are now faced with frag­men­ted, even atom­ised, states and societies.

Nearly fif­teen years later, this obser­va­tion takes on even great­er sig­ni­fic­ance, both for what it says about the asym­metry of threats and tech­no­lo­gic­al advance­ment of forces involved.

Act­ors in asym­met­ric­al war­fare have been quick to under­stand the advant­ages of tech­no­logy to renew their rep­er­toire of action. Lines of code and the art of trans­form­ing civil­ian tech­no­lo­gic­al objects into weapons have now joined the Kalash­nikovs and plastic explos­ives. Impro­vised explos­ives using mobile phones have been replaced by real innov­a­tions, com­bin­ing high-tech civil­ian objects to make for­mid­able weapons that are, for example, effect­ive on a far great­er scale.

A smart­phone and a hun­dred small recre­ation­al drones can cre­ate a swarm of drones, whose coordin­ated attack is cap­able of caus­ing pan­ic on a bat­tle­field and even more so amongst civil­ians. Hack­ers can, like the pir­ates of the past, put them­selves at the ser­vice of a state and con­sti­tute an aux­il­i­ary force cap­able of car­ry­ing out offens­ives against phys­ic­al or soft­ware infra­struc­tures, caus­ing ser­i­ous damage.

Inform­a­tion wars are destabil­isa­tion oper­a­tions car­ried out through highly decent­ral­ised net­works, con­duct­ing attacks that lever­age ten­sions with­in tar­get soci­et­ies. Here again, the res­ults can be massive: the part played by Rus­si­an intel­li­gence in Trump’s elec­tion in 2016 is a remind­er of the rel­ev­ance of Clause­witz’s argu­ment that: “war is a con­tinu­ation of polit­ics, by oth­er means”. Both on the bat­tle­field and far from oper­a­tions, tech­no­logy gives uncon­ven­tion­al modes of action, and the act­ors that wield them, unpre­ced­en­ted power.

This tech­no­lo­gic­al revolu­tion is not without con­sequences in the art of war. It mod­i­fies the theatre of oper­a­tions and fur­ther blurs the idea of the “front line” by allow­ing remote inter­ven­tions. It also changes the pro­file of the play­ers. Finally, it has led to an evol­u­tion in con­ven­tion­al forces, which are tak­ing note of these new threats and learn­ing how to counter them. In March 2021, Israel used swarms of drones coordin­ated by an AI for the first time. The United States has been talk­ing about this since 2015.

Mobile, agile, invent­ive, these entit­ies have points in com­mon with pir­ates, but also with digit­al start-ups: their organ­isa­tion is flex­ible, often decent­ral­ised, and they can mobil­ise a ‘base’ of people who com­pensate for their low crit­ic­al mass.

Richard Taber, the main mod­ern the­or­ist of guer­rilla war­fare, speaks of a “war of the flea” (The War of the Flea: Guer­illa War­fare, The­ory and Prac­tice, Lon­don, Palad­in, 1977). In the tra­di­tion of Clause­witz, he insists on the polit­ic­al dimen­sion of this form of war­fare in the mod­ern age, con­duc­ted by sol­diers who are also mil­it­ants of a cause (nation­al sov­er­eignty in par­tis­an war­fare, com­mun­ist revolu­tion, etc.). He gives a now clas­sic defin­i­tion: “guer­rilla war­fare has the polit­ic­al object­ive of over­throw­ing a con­tested author­ity, by means of small, highly mobile mil­it­ary means using the ele­ment of sur­prise and with a strong capa­city for con­cen­tra­tion and dis­per­sion”. What strikes a read­er in 2021 is that in every detail this defin­i­tion applies to the strategies fol­lowed by digit­al entrepreneurs.

The digit­al age is one of the dis­rup­tion of estab­lished powers by small, agile players.

The digit­al age is the age of the dis­rup­tion of estab­lished powers by small, agile play­ers, such as Airb­nb in the face of the hotel sec­tor or Uber in the face of the power­ful cor­por­a­tions that pro­tect the taxi industry. Appear­ing out of nowhere, they prac­tice uncon­ven­tion­al strategies and choose to move the theatre of oper­a­tions to new spaces where they can con­cen­trate their forces. As for the “dis­per­sion” men­tioned by Richard Taber, the net­work struc­ture, the absence of a pro­pri­et­ary fleet or real estate, in short, the absence of a con­ven­tion­al “army”, is pre­cisely the key to their suc­cess. They rely on a mul­ti­tude of ama­teurs, not on an organ­ised and trained contingent.

They even have causes (shar­ing, sus­tain­able devel­op­ment, social inclu­sion) to enlist these ama­teurs, which are admit­tedly less mobil­ising and less dir­ectly con­nec­ted to their action than those of yesterday’s com­mun­ists or today’s jihadists. How­ever, the voca­tion to change the world, or at least to “dis­rupt” it, is an oblig­at­ory part of the pitch to investors.

Suc­cess­ful small digit­al play­ers rely on the power of cap­it­al to con­cen­trate their forces and move for­ward quickly. The notion of power is there­fore not ali­en to their strategy or their suc­cess. The same is true of today’s guer­ril­las, who rely on private funds or for­eign powers to carry out their actions.

The world of hack­ers provides a link between the two worlds, that of the guer­ril­las and of the start-ups. How­ever, it is above all through a form of recip­roc­al inspir­a­tion that these two worlds com­mu­nic­ate. The strategies of busi­ness and war have often crossed their mod­els. Once again, it seems that we are wit­ness­ing cross-fertilisation.