Overview
While the underlying, fundamental principles of warfare have long remained unchanged, recent social and technological developments have necessitated new approaches to conflict management. Specifically, the introduction of nuclear weapons and the maintenance of large military budgets during peacetime in the latter half of the 20th century have changed the risk calculus of conflict among state and non-state actors. Consequently, the operating environment has changed. Extant, centralized actors have experienced new adversities such as ideological warfare and sustained low intensity and gray zone conflict while new, decentralized participants have emerged and evolved. Nation states, as a part of normal operations, now have to contend with the potential for novel, emergent hazards from a myriad of Complex Threat Surfaces in littoral and other environments. We highlight how Complexity Science has been of use in the analysis of Complex Threat Surfaces in the military and within civilian organizations, particularly High Reliability Organisations or HROs. This paper discusses the intersection of Complexity Science and Military Science by focusing on analysis of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations. We highlight rapid reorganization, pooling collective expertise, and the assembly of novel organizational components as a potential basis for developing spontaneous expertise, actionable intelligence, and solutions to the aforementioned novel, emergent hazards.
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Methods and contributions
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Findings and contributions
- Across the analyses reviewed, the authors identify superior information and OSINT exploitation for rapid planning and reorganization as the common explanation for the Mumbai attackers' success.
- The authors note the Indian government had the same information as the attackers but did not assemble specialists who could have used it.
- They introduce 'Complex Threat Surfaces' in place of 'attack surfaces' to stress integrated management of varied non-linear failure modes, including non-adversarial events.
- They argue that destroying central leadership of decentralized groups may cause fracture and increased complexity rather than collapse.
- The paper concludes that the ability to rapidly reorganize, propagate information, and reassemble teams differentiated event outcomes, and calls for further work on information-sharing design and OSINT.
Methods
- Complexity Science framing of counterinsurgency and team assembly — Applies a Complexity Science lens to link rapid team assembly with counterinsurgency and counterterrorism outcomes.
- Case vignette of the 2008 Lashkar-e-Taiba attack on Mumbai — Reconstructs the Mumbai attack from secondary sources to contrast attackers' OSINT-driven improvisation with responders' inflexibility.
- Synthesis of High Reliability Organization (HRO) literature — Draws on HRO and emergency-response work (e.g. tiger teams, Toyota SMART teams) on organizational fluidity and reorganization.
- Historical comparisons: Malayan Emergency and 1993 New York plot — Uses the Malayan Emergency reorganization and the foiled 1993 New York landmarks plot as contrasting examples of rapid reorganization.
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