UNDERSTANDING THE ENEMY: INSIDE THE MIND OF THE ISLAMIC STATE

by Fortuna's Corner

November 23, 2014 

Political scientist Edward Luttwak once noted that strategy always involves opponents that are thinking, scheming and adjusting. Nothing stays the same forever; what works today often won’t tomorrow. Hopefully the coalition planners understand this and are working hard to get into the mind of IS strategists to understand what they might do when faced with various coalition actions. Ultimately, good red teaming of this sort might be the key to the coalition’s success, while the failure to do it might condemn the coalition to being outmaneuvered by IS. To defeat a wily enemy, one must first get inside its head.

STRATEGIC HORIZONS

Understanding The Enemy: Inside the Mind of the Islamic State

Smoke rises from the Syrian city of Kobani, following an airstrike by the U.S.-led coalition, seen from a hilltop outside Suruc, on the Turkey-Syria border, Nov. 17, 2014 (AP photo by Vadim Ghirda).

This week, military planners from more than 30 countries are gathered at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, to plot their approach against the so-called Islamic State (IS). On the other side of the world, IS is probably mulling its strategy as well. It is easy to imagine how different the two sessions must be, yet the two groups do have one thing in common: Both know that if their strategies are to work, they must first try to get inside the mind of their enemy.

Anticipating what the enemy will do-what security experts call “red teaming”-is never easy, particularly when the antagonists are as different as the two in this conflict. Yet it is vitally important and well worth the effort. While the coalition is probably deep into red teaming, it cannot know precisely what the strategists of IS are thinking. But it can at least imagine what the extremists consider their central choices.

Sound strategy starts with a balance sheet laying out strengths and weaknesses. The goal of strategists is then to exploit their strengths and capitalize on the enemy’s weaknesses. So what, then, might the Islamic State’s balance sheet look like?

It probably counts the steady flow of recruits from the West and other parts of the Islamic world as a strength. No one knows exactly how many foreigners have joined up, but most estimates are in the tens of thousands. IS would also consider its funding and access to arms as plusses. One of the big things going for it is deep disagreement within the coalition, particularly concerning the removal of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and the role of Iran. These rifts allow IS to portray the conflict as a struggle for sectarian justice and survival, a theme that resonates among Sunnis. Finally, IS strategists must consider vacillation within U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration, Washington’s partisan paralysis and the war-weariness of the American public as strengths.

On the other hand, IS must see its lack of state supporters or powerful allies except for other violent extremist movements like al-Qaida as a weakness. Some of its more giddy members may think it can enlarge and sustain its caliphate without help, but the astute within the group know this is unlikely. Yet barbarity is important to IS. As Simon Cottee explained in The Atlantic, “From the outside, the group’s actions look insane. But they aren’t. There appears to be a point to the brutality. It is meant to be polarizing. It is meant to force people to take sides. It is meant to provoke a wider war-a war that ISIS is convinced it will win.”

Finally, the inability of IS to counter U.S. air power is a major weakness and has taken the sort of conventional military assaults that allowed the organization to seize large swaths of territory last summer off the table. It is already adjusting its military strategy to limit the ability of American aircraft to hurt it.

Given this balance sheet of strengths and weaknesses, one issue that the strategists of IS must be considering is the most effective use of violence. The very violence that attracts recruits desperately seeking personal empowerment and some structure of identity risks provoking the U.S. and other coalition members to a degree that could endanger the group’s recent gains. Some IS foot soldiers probably are naive enough to believe that they can intimidate the U.S. and other coalition partners through barbarity. This group undoubtedly advocates launching terrorist attacks in the U.S., Europe and the Gulf states. Others understand that if the U.S. is angered too much, it will strike back hard. America could send large ground formations and do serious damage to IS. Some of the extremists probably believe this would be a good thing and increase sympathy for it elsewhere in the Islamic world, but the question is whether the costs would be militarily sustainable.

A second issue the IS strategists must be dealing with is phasing. Should the extremists push as far and as fast as possible, perhaps trying to gain a foothold in the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant, or pause and consolidate control over what it has already seized? If they push as hard and as far as they can, they may overextend themselves and become vulnerable. The leaders of IS are undoubtedly aware of how quickly the Arabs conquered vast territory in the seventh and eighth centuries, but also know that the conquerors eventually ran out of steam. Yet if the movement stops to consolidate, it may lose the initiative and even be pushed back.

The third major issue is how to respond if the coalition gets its act together and launches an effective offensive. If this happens, should IS stand its ground and fight to the death, hoping that this will cause enough casualties to make the coalition falter or at least attract new recruits? Or should it follow al-Qaida’s lead during the 2001 U.S. offensive in Afghanistan and disperse to fight another day, perhaps shifting the conflict to other places? Al-Qaida pulled this off because it was not deeply tied to holding on to the parts of Afghanistan that it controlled. IS, by contrast, is much more deeply embedded in the Sunni Arab region of western Iraq and eastern Syria, so it might be less inclined to retreat than was Osama bin Laden’s organization.

Political scientist Edward Luttwak once noted that strategy always involves opponents that are thinking, scheming and adjusting. Nothing stays the same forever; what works today often won’t tomorrow. Hopefully the coalition planners understand this and are working hard to get into the mind of IS strategists to understand what they might do when faced with various coalition actions. Ultimately, good red teaming of this sort might be the key to the coalition’s success, while the failure to do it might condemn the coalition to being outmaneuvered by IS. To defeat a wily enemy, one must first get inside its head.

Steven Metz is director of research at the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute and the author of “Iraq and the Evolution of American Strategy.” His weekly WPR column, Strategic Horizons, appears every Friday. You can follow him on Twitter @steven_metz. All ideas in this essay are strictly his own and do not represent the official position of the U.S. Army or U.S. Army War College.