In 2019, a group known as the Order of Nine Angles (O9A) a Satanist neo-Nazi group founded in the United Kingdom that is hellbent on the collapse of world governments, was identified by the FBI in recently declassified files as the aggressors in a series of church arsons in the United States. Two years later, the Russian investigation committee confirmed a couple claiming to be part of the O9A ritualistically murdered two sisters across the world in Saint Petersburg. As a generation born in a post-9/11 America, there has not been a stage in our lives where terrorism has been irrelevant on the national stage. When we visualize terrorism and terrorist networks, the American psyche is quick to conjure an image of a militia made up of irregular soldiers like ISIS practicing guerrilla warfare to win a war of attrition against conventional armies. However, technological leaps and radicalization of youth might redefine how Americans perceive terrorism in our lifetimes.
Modern insurgency was defined by the Algerian struggle for independence against France, where the Front for National Liberation adopted a strategy pioneered by the French Resistance during the Second World War decades earlier called the Clandestine cell system. This system of coordination was a hierarchical structure with a high command committee, which was divided into subordinate command centers that were only further divided. This system guaranteed that one guerilla only knew at most two other guerillas in the organization, meaning that if one terrorist was captured, the entire cell couldn’t be exposed at once. While this significantly slows the identification of members of the organization, it only delays the inevitable and can be diagrammed.
However, when the United States landed in Iraq in 2003, there was no identifiable chain of command like what the French were able to find in Algeria. Rather, there is a collection of differing insurgent groups with varying goals and a common enemy, coordinating in a loose network. Unlike previous insurgencies the United States had fought, insurgent use of telecommunications allowed for the dissemination of information. This technologically savvy and leaderless insurgency was deemed Network-Centric Warfare (NCW) by the Department of Defense in the 1990s. The initial occupation of Iraq saw little insurgent activity, but as word of mouth spread about insurgent victory, more sought to join. This was amplified by the restoration of electricity in Iraq, which televised both insurgent victories and the failure of the international coalition’s goals.
Recently, with the widespread adoption of social media paired with the unregulated and decentralized nature of the internet, a new form of terrorism, dubbed lone wolf terrorism, has seen a drastic increase in activity in countries with large populations of tech-savvy youth. Social media, predominantly platforms with little to no administration over users like Telegram and 4chan, are used to slowly radicalize lone actors to commit acts of violence. These platforms then celebrate the lone actor, depicting them as martyrs. In the 2019 Christchurch Attacks in New Zealand, a gym instructor with no previous criminal history, radicalized by online forums, committed a mass-shooting at a Mosque in New Zealand, killing 51 people while live-streaming the shooting on Facebook. The online reaction was similar to that of insurgent activity in Iraq; hate-groups used information technologies and online platforms to spread the shooter’s manifesto and video. His manifesto and shooting video were referenced by a separate mass shooter as the main source of inspiration for a synagogue shooting in San Diego months later.
The networks used to radicalize youth have no formal structure and are very poised to sudden shifts in their makeup. Operational from 2011-2017, the Iron March Forum was a contestation of extremist cells which preached so-called militant accelerationism. The most prominent of these cells was called the Atomwaffen division. This group was linked to a dozen murders and terrorist plots, according to the George Washington program on Extremism, but it held only symbolic clout in the terrorist network. After the arrest of the most prominent Atomwaffen member for the harboring of unregulated explosives, the Atomwaffen essentially dissolved and was replaced by a variety of spinoff groups. Tech against Terrorism defines this relationship between independent groups and their members as, “less as a central command or an umbrella structure and more as a brand that can be adopted and dropped at will by sympathetic or aspiring cells that lack meaningful structural links.” Such a relationship makes the group completely unpredictable; there is no measuring the radicalization of an individual, nor how they will interpret and apply the variety of niche ideologies belonging to this loose network. This results in seemingly random attacks transnationally with no relatively effective way for the intelligence community to counter them besides the monitoring of known extremist group chats.