Al-Aqsa Storm Heralds the Rise of Non-state Special Operations
How were the extensive preparations necessary to plan and execute such an attack missed by Israel and others? The essential logic of generating military force is predicated on amassing physical and human capital. Nation-states have performed this task extraordinarily well for the last 1,000 years, and some consider this effort to be the defining activity of states. Other entities, such as multinational corporations, social movements, and extremist groups, by contrast, are commonly believed to face systematic barriers — legal, normative, fiscal, organizational, and human — that prevent them from generating and sustaining such military force. Despite the inherent advantage that nation-states enjoy, however, they are in turn inherently vulnerable to such force. With a fixed geographic footprint, population, infrastructure, and economic base, nations are susceptible to attack in a way that non-state actors generally are not.
Non-state actors use terrorism to leverage state vulnerabilities to achieve political and psychological effects through the application of purposeful violence without the machinery and resourcing associated with conventional military power. This is why so many observers are concerned about terrorist groups acquiring “magic bullet” technology, such as nuclear weapons and strategic cyber effects, or repurposing readily available tech, such as flying commercial airliners into skyscrapers, to scale up their acts of terror.
What is less understood is how non-state groups seek to overcome the challenge of generating military power through the leveraging of established techniques, such as basic military training and detailed planning, alongside easily acquired technology like AK-47s and motorcycles. This can allow a non-state group to generate an approximation of military power to achieve strategic effects, even if they cannot sustain it for long periods of time. If such approximated military power is applied at the right time and place, it may have an outsized impact. As one of us wrote in these pages five years ago, “marginal improvement of tactical prowess in violent non-state groups may lead to outcomes that have strategic implications.” Indeed, Israel has underestimated non-state actor capability more recently. Despite its claims to have humbled Hizballah in the 2006 war, even supporters like former President George W. Bush wrote in his memoirs that Israel had underperformed in the conflict against a capable non-state actor.
There are several possible reasons for Israel’s underestimation of Hamas. The first reason is that non-state actors have an inherent advantage in concealing their choices in investments, doctrine, and force structure. The second relates to a general tendency in recent years for security professionals in the West to focus on cutting-edge technology while neglecting the “mundane” (but still important) bases of generating force. The final reason is a seemingly inescapable prejudice when considering actors such as Hamas or the Islamic State that conflates such groups’ ideologies and perverse actions with their competence. This underestimation provides expanded policy options for the political and military leadership of a non-state actor like Hamas.
Blanken, Rice, and Whiteside conclude that “it is becoming increasingly clear that states’ monopoly over special operations is over. The growing proliferation of military technologies, coupled with the consistent underestimation of militant groups, is allowing non-state actors to take on states and demonstrate the power to hurt.”
