Irregular warfare: Counterinsurgency or something else - Essay Example

acts but terrorists attempt to attach legitimacy and heroism for the acts for a certain population. 3 Unlike insurgency, the objective of terrorists is to destroy or substantially weaken through fear and annihilation a population. The terrorist objective is not to acquire political power among the population nor even legitimacy against its target population but to substantially weaken and even destroy the population. Terrorists conduct propaganda among a population to promote the legitimacy and popularize a point that its acts of terrorism are heroic acts.

However, among its targets for substantial weakening or destruction, it has no objective of gaining legitimacy and an image of a hero. It seeks to sow deep fear and terror against an adversary population. Although Al Qaedda terrorists try to convert some of the population to its particular version of Islamic ideology, terrorists do not attempt to draw mass support from the civilians of its enemy population. Instead, it simply tries to make itself INVISIBLE among the civilian population. In contrast, insurgents do not make themselves invisible but attempts to immerse themselves with the population and convert the population as its network of support.

Terrorism has also its mass support but its mass support outside of its country bases is usually very small and there is no significant attempt to significantly enlarge that mass support. Nevertheless, terrorists “seek attention for their cause to generate domestic and international empathy for the plight that ‘drove’ the terrorists to arms.”4 Because terrorists do not discriminate between military and civilians, between women and men, between adults and children, and between children and babies, every part of the civilian population is a target for terrorists.

Thus, terrorists can make any populated geographical area its target and its battlefield. Given the nature of terrorist, one of the priorities of irregular warfare is to make the invisible enemies visible and deprive the terrorists of civilian targets through intensified surveillance aided by the most advance technology. The invisible should be made visible by the most advance technology and techniques of espionage. Because they do not rely on a sea of mass support for operation, another priority is to identify their supply lines and network which should not be relatively large unlike the insurgents’.

We can deprive terrorists of their large target by conducting information and education work among the civilian population who do not support by the terrorists but who are in fact threatened by the terrorists. We must hardened the targets of terrorist activities so that they would be deprived of the military initiative to launch an attack against the civilian targets. One of the terrorist’s weapon component is his or her own body. That body may be that of a man, a child, a young girl, or a young boy with bombs.

The suicide bomber can also be in cars or with cars. These are among the messy sides of the irregular war, which we must be accustomed. Dealing with these threats requires that we must be good in making the invisible visible and hardening the civilian targets as well. By hardening the civilian targets, this should mean that the civilian population are made aware of the risks and are aware of what steps to take when confronted with the risks. This