Recently, there have been some very high-profile endorsements of this sort of network building. Perhaps the most important came from Admiral William McRaven, head of Special Operations Command, who in testimony before a subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee two weeks ago emphasized his intent "to build lasting formal and informal networks" with a wide range of allies. McRaven's plan should be viewed as a logical extension of ideas advanced a decade ago by another admiral -- and former national security adviser to Ronald Reagan -- John Poindexter. Admiral Poindexter's concept of "total information awareness" sounded a bit too Orwellian, and even softening it to "terrorism information awareness" didn't help, so the concepts were publicly dismissed. But his ideas about collecting and networking big data flows have lived on under new programs whose code names cannot be mentioned. If al-Suri is the godfather of the small-cell concept, Admiral Poindexter is surely the wizard of big data.
And so the organizational race is on. Abu Mus'ab al-Suri's "program" (al-manhaj) has clearly borne fruit, with small cells popping up in many places around the world. The goal is to build enough of them so that no single cell has to mount an attack more than, say, once per year. It is their cumulative effect that will achieve the desired terrorist drumbeat. If this is the model to which the Tsarnaev brothers were adhering, it then made sense for them to remain in the area in the wake of their attack on the Boston Marathon rather than to go on the lam immediately. Under the al-Suri model, they would just remain dormant until the heat was off, then strike again in a year or so. Al-Suri's hope is that the limited scale of attacks conducted by his cells will, even now, cause disproportionate psychological trauma and one day achieve massive cumulative material effects.
Yet it seems that al-Suri may not have reckoned sufficiently with the power of big-data networking. Yes, a small cell -- perhaps one motivated by his concept -- did pull off an attack in Boston last week. But massive flows of shared information swiftly identified the malefactors and brought them down. This is clearly not the dynamic al-Suri wants to see unfold -- one and done. If this is how matters will play out, his program will be in big trouble because of the power of big data. And when one adds in the losses to the small-cell network due to preemptions before some of these cells can mount a single attack, terrorist prospects look even worse.
Clearly, counterterrorism forces have gotten into the organizational race to build networks of their own to counter the dark networks that our -- and our world's -- enemies are forming. And they are giving a good account of themselves in the field. But this is hardly a time for even the slightest degree of complacency to set in. What our adversaries have shown us over the past decade and more is their resilience and creativity. This fight, like the race that was struck by terror last week, is a marathon.
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