User:Hcberkowitz/Sandbox-TerrEssay

When working on the counterterrorism article, reference was made to several ongoing conflicts in which either or both sides use terrorist tactics. Protests from editors concerned with specific conflicts complained, in a manner that I did not, at first, understand, about referring to terrorism and counterterrorism in those conflicts. Exploring the controversy, it became obvious there is much confusion about even more general conflating of tactics and ideologies, and about the definition of a tactic "foo" as well as "counter-foo" and "anti-foo". MILHIST editors may benefit from what I learned, especially where terms of military art may seem well-defined to people who have studied that art, but variants of those terms may have completely different connotations to generalists.

The conflict may be an war between nation-states, a civil war, an insurgency, or a conflict involving transnational groups. What did become obvious was a great deal of confusion caused by the political/media use of phrases such as "War against Terror", which are rarely, if ever, used by writers familiar with military literature, but quite often by politicians and the sound-bite journalist jackals in hot pursuit (my apologies to jackals, hyenas, etc., for likening them to the less savory of journalists).

One editor objected to mention of the Sri Lankan Civil War as an example where counterterrorism is present, conflating the existence of terror and counterterror tactics with a "War on Terror". The term "War on Terror" had not even been used in the section in question, but there has been so much sensitization about the phrase that the ideological/propaganda term became conflated with tactics and countertactics. Black Falcon helped greatly in clarifying the confusion. It became apparent that some perfectly sincere editors had never come across "terrorism" in other than a politicized concept, so, not illogically, assumed that a reference to "counterterror" with respect to a particular conflict meant that conflict was part of the "Global War on Terror". On reflection, this is a general terminology conflict that may recur elsewhere.

Let me avoid the emotionally charged term "terror", even where clearly labeled a tactic. For me, at least, it was useful to use a less controversial form of military tactics (and yes, I am aware that in some cases, operational art or strategy may be more appropriate than tactics).

I am also aware that Wikipedia does not have a right not to be offended, and, if some project or interest group considers something "politically incorrect" that is quite appropriate to MILHIST, we need not be constrained if we make a fair attempt to resolve the conflict. If editors in another group continue to delete, then protection may be needed.

Glossary or other guide?

Forgive me if this is present and I missed it, but, as someone who is not a Project member but encountered a problem, resolved amicably with everyone involved learning things, that was caused by a combination of different usages of "general" phrases, as well as being aware of the SRL project's usage. I'm not trying to criticize anyone, but simply note the "Lessons Learned". The Military History Project is creating an assortment of essays to record lessons learned (a common military term of art), and give guidance to editors in finding certain materials. Perhaps there can be some equivalent "lesson learned" here, although I don't know how to solve the problem when an editor does good faith edits that do not reflect what the SRL project considers neutral language; the best I can suggest is not immediately to revert or edit, but to bring up the concern on the article's talk page, and initially to assume good faith if the editor does not seem familiar with the details of Sri Lankan matters.

In the specific, everyone agreed, I think, that "war on terror" and "global war on terror" are essentially meaningless terms used by politicians and lazy journalists. Even "terrorist group" is marginal, and, at least to military specialists, says nothing about ideology, who is right, etc. Perhaps an analogy would help: it is fair to call the US and Russia "nuclear powers". That could probably be rephrased to "nuclear weapons groups" without any real loss of meaning. One could call the UK and France and Japan and Argentina "naval powers", without judging who was right or wrong in the Falklands/Malvinas conflict.

There was a sensitivity about my referring to antiterror and counterterror, apparently because it implied, to some, that using these terms somehow made one side a "bad guy" in the "global war on terror". That was not the intention; it was first to establish that one side used terror tactics/weapons just as the above used ships or nuclear weapons. Antiterror and counterterror are specific sets of measures used to reduce the danger of terrorist attacks.

Your project, however, could have its own reference that would have helped me -- apparently, "government" and "rebels" are considered fairly neutral? I don't know if there are any particular meanings you assign to "assassination" or "suicide attack". As I mentioned above, there are examples of both from conventional warfare between nation-states, which no one seriously called terror. That is not to say there were no state-sponsored acts of terror in World War Two, ranging from the "dehousing strategy" of deliberate population bombing by British Marshal of the Royal Air Force Arthur Tedder, to Japanese reprisals against China after the Doolittle Raid.

In general, it starts with the premise that military methods are separable from ideology and perhaps culturally dependent views of good and evil. Just to avoid falling immediately into the emotionally laden issue of terrorism, I plan to start with air warfare, and then explain how there are defensive methods that either disable the enemy air force at its bases ("Offensive counter-air") or protect targets from air attack ("Defensive counter-air"). You may observe that "anti-" and "counter-" are not universal terms.

Following this example, I am going to give a rough definition of terrorism, not to be exhaustive but as a working reference. Counterterror is the "far" defense and antiterror is the "near" defense, or, if you will, counterterror is "offensive" and "preemptive" while antiterror is "defensive".

Air warfare examples

Consider a conflict in which military aircraft of Side 1 attack ground installations of Side 2 as part of a larger strategy. One of the families of tactics a side can employ is counter-air, which seeks to present the other side from using its airpower effectively.

Offensive counter-air

Offensive counter-air (OCA) is a set of actions, by Side 2, that are intended to prevent Side 1 from using its air force at all. A basic OCA tactic is direct attacks on airfields and supporting infrastructure, which may need to be preceded with suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD) before the air facilities can be attacked.

Another OCA technique is the fighter sweep. In this tactic, fighters, configured for air-to-air, fly over enemy territory, trying to get enemy fighters to engage them on favorable terms for one's own side. A fighter sweep often involves deception, as in Operation Bolo in the Vietnam War. It may involve concealment, such as Second World War Royal Air Force "Rhubarb" attacks where the RAF fighters used cloud cover, in that largely radar-free environment, to approach a target, such as an airfield where they might engage enemy aircraft committed to takeoff or landing profiles, in which they cannot maneuver.

Defensive counter-air

Defensive counter-air (DCA) reduces the vulnerability of Side 2 targets by active and passive measures. Active DCA includes surface-to-air missiles (SAM), fighter interceptors, anti-aircraft artillery (AAA), and electronic warfare directed against offensive electronics (e.g., the World War Two "Battle of the Beams"). Passive DCA reduces the vulnerability of Side 2 targets, through means including hardening, camouflage, dispersion, etc.

Active DCA

Active DCA uses air, sea, and ground based assets that either physically destroy the enemy, using antiaircraft artillery (AAA), surface-to-air missiles (SAM), and fighter aircraft armed with autocannon or air-to-air missiles (AAM). Fighters have the greatest range and flexibility, but cannot provide continuous coverage of a protected area.

In the past, certain fighter aircraft were specialized for the aircraft interception mission. Multirole combat aircraft have replaced them, but some interceptors, such as the Russian MiG-25. Interceptors tend to have very high speed, but little maneuverability if they were intended to go against bombers. Their high speed and altitude capability can make them useful as reconnaissance platforms, such as the MiG-25R.

Active DCA systems can be divided by their area of coverage. Fighters and longer-range SAMs can cover areas containing numerous surface targets, while point defense of short-range SAMs and AAA can protect specific targets. A special case is the protection of high-value assets such as AWACS and tankers, which usually involves fighters, and possibly electronic warfare aircraft, escorting them.

Passive DCA

Passive DCA includes measures intended to prevent the enemy from finding, or at least accurately targeting, one's own installations. It also includes measures to limit the damage of attacks once the resource can be targeted.

Camouflage, concealment(e.g., inside a innocent-looking structure or underground), and the use of deception help interfere with targeting. Hardening, dispersal, and electronic countermeasures interfere with the attack's potential to cause damage

Balance of Strategic Terror

Given today's overloading of "terror", I am a little hesitant to use it in the Cold War sense of Mutual Assured Destruction, but many authors have spoken of MAD as a balance of terror.

Is there any serious argument that the US and Soviet Union were inappropriately called "nuclear powers", because they had nuclear weapons and delivery systems? If so, are they prevented from being (non-nuclear) "naval powers", "tank powers", or "special operations powers"? If a given entity makes use of terrorism, than it is fair to call it a "terrorist power", with the full understanding that it can have many forms of exerting force that are not defined as terrorism.

Now, recognizing we do not have as solid a definition of "terrorism" as we do "I don't want to overuse analogies, but Herman Kahn posed three scenarios in nuclear war:

1. Counterforce with avoidance, where the weapons to attack a military objective are chosen to minimize risk to noncombatants, even if that lowers the probability of successful attack,
2. Unmodified counterforce, where weapon selection is made purely on the basis of the best way to destroy the target,
3. Counterforce with bonus, where the weapon is selected to maximize damage beyond the military target proper.

Now, use this in the context of suicide bombing. A kamikaze determined, as some were, to attack only warships even if a troop transport was closer, was doing a version of counterforce with avoidance: only attacking warriors. If that pilot crashed the first ship he saw, combatant or noncombatant but part of an invasion fleet, it was unmodified counterforce. If he avoided warships to crash a troop transport, he was doing counterforce with bonus -- although he was still attacking military personnel.

Terrorism: a difficult definition

In the case of Sri Lanka, several WP:RS spoke of suicide attacks in Sri Lanka, many as a form of targeted assassination, but all causing casualties among civilians, with the means of attack not especially selective of the target alone. An editor objected to my using those sources as a basis for "counterterror", since they did not use the explicit word counterterror -- but did mention terror. His interpretation seemed to be, until the matter resolved, was that if a side practiced counterterror, it was "good", while the other side were "bad terrorists".

How are countermeasures to such attacks, meeting the usual definition of terrorism as spreading fear among neutrals, not anti- and counter-terrorism?

Terrorism: a spectrum of activities and tactics

If I may be permitted a bit of perspective, the idea of a "terrorist" or a "terrorist group" seems to be a reasonably recent one, with various sides, the US government not the least, turning it into a categorization of a movement, or even an individual, rather than as a tactic. I first worked with materials on "terrorism" in the mid- to late-1960s, from authors as diverse as Lenin, George Grivas (Greek Cypriot), Japanese Army reprisals against Chinese citizens, etc. Forgive me for making assumptions here, but you may be more familiar with the relatively recent usage of characterizing groups as "terrorist", which really is something of the last few decades, than has been the usage in a much longer period of professional writings about unconventional warfare.

This discussion is informative to me, as it drives home how much a word has become overloaded to the point of being meaningless. Churchill commented that history would be kind to him, because he intended to write it. I think you may well find that for people not invested in a particular side or ideology of a conflict, terrorism is simply one more tactic. One can speak of defense against artillery, and one can speak of defense against terrorism. In each case, the side defending can act while the threat is far away, as by bombing a cannon factory, or when it is near, such as camouflaging artillery targets (passive defense) and "counterbattery", which links radar and other sensors to track a shell back to its firing point and tries to have return fire heading back before the shell lands.

So what is terror?

There is no universally accepted definition. The U.S. military defines it as

The calculated use of unlawful violence or threat of unlawful violence to inculcate

fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that

are generally political, religious, or ideological.

If both sides in Sri Lanka use terror, than both sides presumably defend against it. When I say I am taking action against terror, it has to be individualized for a tactical situation, not against an ideology; a "War against terror" is a rather ludicrous concept. One could equally well have a "war against tanks". In some conflict, only one side may use terrorist techniques, and in multipolar situations such as Iraq, there may literally be tens of groups using terror and defending themselves from terror.

It literally had not occurred to me that the conflicts here would be characterized as wars of terror alone. While I am not intimately familiar with the conflict in Sri Lanka, I believe there have been reasonably straightforward military-on-military actions, especially at sea, where there are few innocent bystanders. I am open to saying that terrorism and counter/anti-terrorism, as well as conventional military actions, are part of a conflict, and I hope we can avoid the absurdity of a "war against terror."

I agree that "terrorism" should be understood to refer to a specific set of tactics of violence, rather than to a mindset or ideology, and that the development of the latter meaning was due to politicians rather than scholars. That said, it is an unfortunate reality that the second meaning tends to predominate in common conversation, and it is likely that some readers will interpret it in that context.

To illustrate that to a military analyst, rather than to a politician or sound bite journalist, terror is a tactic just as aerial bombing is a tactic. I'd welcome your opinion if the analogy to the equally formal terms of offensive counter-air and defensive counter-air/antiaircraft helps separate the idea of tactic versus ideology. Neither missiles nor hand-emplaced explosives are ideologies.

The political meaning is seen by some readers, but that does not make their interpretation correct. For that reason, I cited formal definitions of the first set of meanings. It does not seem reasonable to redefine terms of art, used by authorities in the field, because the second and incorrect set have gained news media appeal. There is a demonstration of how fruitless a political interpretation may be, since the dispute here really had very little to do with the general subject of the article, but a sensitivity to having any implication of "terrorist ideology" applied to one side in one conflict.

Terror and military combat

Unfortunately, many definitions are nuanced. Is assassination of a leader an act of terrorism? Without additional information, there is no way to say. To take a Second World War example, the assassination of Admiral Yamamoto, commanding the Mobile Fleet, in uniform and flying in a bomber attacked by fighters over international waters, would rarely be considered terrorism because no noncombatants were even present. If, in another assassination, the weapons and tactics were chosen to kill as many people in a public place as possible, with the death of the target almost incidental, that would qualify as use of terrorist tactics.

I think User:Black Falcon's edits do an excellent job of clarifying the section and addressing the potential for confusion. The consideration of "terrorism" as an ideology or movement, along with the notion of a "war against terror", defines the term in terms of a wholly subjective Manichean dichotomy of good versus evil, just versus unjust, and legitimate versus illegitimate. To have any chance of being at least partly objective, a definition of terrorism must focus on the event itself (that is, the tactics used, the context of the incident, and its particular purpose) rather than on subjective evaluations of the moral character of the attacker or the target, or on the legitimacy of their general aims.

"[A] definition of terrorism needs to be separated as much as possible from evaluations of the groups using violence and their targets."

Counterterror and antiterror

Again emphasizing it is a continuum, counterterrorism is more offensive/preemptive than antiterrorism. For example, there are suicide bombers in many parts of the world and in many terrorist campaigns. It is clearly preemptive to use national intelligence to locate a remote training base and attack it. Putting a blast shield in front of a person, in a public place, who is at high risk of such attack is clearly defensive. Now, in the real world, consider a public area where observers and snipers attempt to identify suicide attackers approaching an area, and shoot them at long range. Is this offensive or defensive? What if the observer used an unmanned aerial vehicle to detect and engage a suspect vehicle several miles/kilometers away? When does defense become offense? As User:Black Falcon observed, there is a continuum between antiterror and counterterror.

I do not believe it original synthesis of any sort to say there is a spectrum of countermeasures used against terrorists. If both sides of a conflict use the techniques of terror, generally defined as attacks that solely or partially try to injure noncombatants to increase fear, it is artificial to demand that the exact word counterterror or antiterror must be used. Just for clarity's sake, the Japanese kamikaze were not considered terrorists, because they exclusively engaged military targets.

Silly and useful definitions

I have not used the term "War on Terrorism", which I consider semantically null; one cannot declare war on a tactic. A U.S. definition of antiterrorismis:

Defensive measures used to reduce the vulnerability of individuals and property to terrorist acts, to include limited response and containment by local military and civilian forces.

I do not insist that any one particular word be used, but I would like to highlight a potential issue that accompanies the use of "anti-terrorism activity". As you have defined it above, anti-terrorism is (like counter-terrorism) a tactic and, thus, refers to the actions being taken by a government; however, I think the term could also easily be (mis)interpreted as meaning "action against terrorists", which would refer to the nature of anti-government groups. Perhaps this is the basis of the disagreement , and it might help to clarify the meaning of the term in the section where it is discussed.

These may help illustrate that an act cannot be deemed terrorist or not without having more context, and that, to any rational military analyst, "War against terror" makes absolutely no sense unless, I suppose, the acts are conducted by nihilists who have no goal other than mass murder.

Conclusion

I have no problem with saying both sides use antiterrorism, or, for that matter, counterterrorism might fit better because that is the title of the article. My suggestion, and it is a suggestion, that it would be simpler to say that both sides use terror, and not get into the complexities of antiterrorism versus counterterrorism. When "terror", "counterterror", and "antiterror" are used in a military sense, there are no implications of Good vs. Evil.

I would also observe that "Wars against Terror" are the artificial creation of certain US politicians and the media who seize on their sound bites. Civil wars can contain terror, just as a T-54 tank knocked down the gates of the South Vietnamese Presidential Palace using the tactics of armored warfare in the final Vietnamese Civil War. If terror is regarded as one of many tactics, and anti-/counter-terror as countertactics, words and phrases become much less emotionally charged.