The Open Jihad

Over the past couple of weeks, the open jihad has taken ground in Libya, Nigeria, Syria, and Iraq.  It's ongoing success is due to innovations developed by a large and growing number of contributing groups.  Groups like:

ISIS affiliated forces in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and Yemen to
Boko Haram in Nigeria to
ISIS and AQ affiliated terrorist groups  inside Saudi Arabia, UK, Egypt, etc.

Open jihad evolves (gets better) through massively parallel co-development.  All of the groups in the open jihad, no matter how small (even down to individuals), can contribute.  They do this by:

tinkering with tactics, strategies, and technologies that can be used to advance the open jihad.
testing the efficacy of these innovations by using them against the enemy. In other words, throwing them against the wall to see what sticks.
copying the innovations that work.  

The groups in the open jihad can communicate successful innovations without even using the forms of communication we pay the NSA tens of billions a year to spy on.   Instead, they communicate successful innovation through a process called stigmergy (which we do surprisingly little to analyze).  I first wrote about stigmergy back in 2004.  That earlier description is still valid today.  

Stigmergy is a term used in biology (from the work of french biologist Pierre-Paul Grasse) to describe environmental mechanisms for coordinating the work of independent actors (for example, ants use pheromones to create trails and people use weblog links to establish information paths, for others to follow).  The term is derived from the greek words stigma ("sign") andergon ("to act"). Stigmergy can be used as a mechanism to understand underlying patterns in swarming activity.  As such, it can be applied to the understanding of swarming attacks by diverse bands of attackers.  A knowledge of stigmergy is a key to understanding how these groups learn.   Stigmergic systems use simple environmental signals to coordinate that actions of independent agents (each with their own decision making process). These signals are used to coordinate scalable, robust, and dynamic activity. This activity is often much more intelligent that the actions capable by the individual actors (in this case individual global guerrilla groups). There are four basic mechanisms used in stigmergic communication. They are:

Marker-based. Markers or signs left by actors influence the action of other actors. In the GG (global guerrilla) context this is the site of an attack and the news of the attack that is delivered by the media. The description of the attack in the media is stigmergic marker for others to follow.
Sematectonic. Environmental conditions influence the behavior of all actors in the system. For GGs, multiple attacks on a certain type of target can generate a security response by the nation-state that changes the potential of attacks against that type of target in the immediate future. An increased security presence for those types of targets is a sema-tectonic signal to select something else.
Quantitative. The environmental signals are of a single scalable type. The size of a Global Guerrilla attack on a given location can meter the scale of the security response. 
Qualitative. The environmental signals are of a varied type.  They message changes based on their combination. Different types of attacks on the same target will yield information on the type of attack that is the most effective.

 

 

PS:  We have a tendency to dismiss tinkering as a foolish endeavor.  All of the great breakthroughs in modern technology have been found through tinkering -- from airplanes to cars to PCs to telephones to anti-biotics to electricity -- and not through investment in big, industrial labs.