The threat of Islamic terrorism is going to be with us for the next 10-15 years at a minimum. It will persist in attenuated forms for a very long time after that but will no longer represent an existential threat to America. Our technology will evolve in such a way as to make terrorist activity much less likely to succeed and much easier to combat. In the first post of a series, Fast Forward: Part I , I wrote:
The Arab world, and perhaps the greater Islamic world, produces nothing except the oil which they can extract from the ground using Western technology. Considering that technology tends to accelerate at a geometric rate, with new discoveries paving the way for even more new discoveries, the chance of the (radical) Islamic world entering the technological world, except as parasitic users, is negligible, especially in light of their cultural and religious belief that all knowledge has already been revealed.
Further, as the technology gap increases between the West and Islam, their ability to benefit from the types of asymmetrical warfare that they have perfected diminishes.
Just one example: Unmanned surveillance vehicles have become important tools of our military. They have been armed with missiles and have been quite effective in killing major terrorist opponents. In the world of high tech, everything gets smaller, and cheaper, over time. In 10-15 years, we will have unmanned aerial robots the size of mosquitoes. Supply them with cameras and other sensors, wireless connections, and drop millions of them in an area of interest. By developing a real time picture of everyone in an area, their ability to escape detection vanishes. Now, consider arming our mosquitoes with cyanide or botulism toxin and direct who they "bite." Terrorists will be dead before they know what happened. And if others learn from the experience and live under mosquito netting, use the mosquitoes to direct JDAMS or other larger munitions that will do the job. Pretty soon, hiding in a cave or in the jungle (are you listening, Hugo) won't protect you form the American/Israeli/Australian/English military.
Within our own country, surveillance in real time is already becoming ubiquitous, with cameras on street corners appearing with increasing regularity. As terrorist incidents continue to occur around the world, the pressure to expand such surveillance will increase.
Both Democratic and Republican administrations would be remiss to eschew such technological responses to the threat of terror. When the sensors approach the size of dust grains, we can expect cities to be inhabited by countless numbers of such sensors, constantly monitoring our environment for toxins, viruses, bacteria, radiation, all the tell tales of terrorist activity. It is likely that there will come a time when such sensors can actually take DNA samples in close to real time to identify known terrorists. Most of this will be done under the civil liberties radar and will be quietly accepted as a price we pay for our security. (The impact on crime rates and the significant danger to civil liberties are beyond the scope of this post.)
On another front, the power of the Muslim world, which derives almost entirely from their possession of petroleum reserves, will wane as the West finds alternative sources of oil and energy. The price of energy is likely to stay high for a while and then begin a long term slide that will bankrupt the oil states, most of whom are our enemies. The nations which have human capital able to develop and use cutting edge technology will have a rapidly widening advantage over those states which, for reasons of culture, education, religion, etc, cannot develop or sustain such technology.
In a post on Moore's Law & Counter-Insurgency, I described how this process might develop in the military field. I imagined how the recent Israeli fighting in Southern Lebanon ans Gaza might look in a few years:
It is clear that this is very dangerous work for the Israelis; the Palestinians can easily set up ambushes, IEDs, and other nasty surprises. Now, picture the scene 5-10 years down the road.
During the day, a flock of Smart Sparrows networked together offer daylight coverage of areas of concern; at night, they are replaced by a flock of smart bats equipped with night vision and all part of a meshed network. These flying birds and bats provide 24 hour real time coverage of whatever parts of an enemy territory you desire. They can fly high enough to be invisible from the ground and are nearly impossible to shoot down even when spotted. The Palestinians can kill all the birds they see in Gaza, but when Smart Sparrows cost a few dollars and the next generation of surveillance includes Smart Mosquitoes, their problems become exponentially greater. If they spend all their time hidden indoors, they can't fire Qassam rockets at Israel, which is one of the goals of the current Israeli incursion. Furthermore, Smart Snakes can slither into buildings, and even if they can be defended against, Smart Cockroaches and Centipedes, once cheap enough, will be ubiquitous. If necessary, it would be simple to equip such robots with reservoirs of Cyanide or some other such poison (spider venom?), at which point targeted killings and Smart bullets would take on a whole new meaning.
Additionally, the gap between technological societies and those that are parasitic on such technology will inevitably widen as the pace of technological innovation increases. The ability of a country like Iran, or a terrorist group like Hezbollah or al Qaeda, to destroy their enemies will lessen as time goes on, even while the power of the lone individual will increase. While that may seem paradoxical, in a networked world, even as the individual becomes more empowered, the abilities of networked groups of individuals will increase exponentially. Thus, a lone renegade scientist could theoretically develop a new strain of smallpox, yet the system's ability to respond quickly and prevent much damage from such an outbreak would increase at a faster rate than that lone individual's capabilities.
It should be clear from this that terrorism as a tactic to press the goals of Islamic radicalism has a 10-15 year horizon.
In the next few days I would like to explore the best case, worst case, and mid-case scenarios for the relatively near term.
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