The following article written for Risk Transfer Magazine by Gordon Woo, natural catastrophist consultant for RMS, was published in September 2002.

‘I make my adversary see my strengths as weaknesses, and my weaknesses as strengths, while I cause his strengths to become weaknesses’. This quote might have been made by a contemporary business executive; in fact, it was written two and a half thousand years ago by one of the greatest of all military thinkers: Sun Tzu. His masterpiece, ‘The Art of War’, is a classic treatise on the strategy of human conflict: as applicable to the boardroom as the battlefield. Facing defeat in the First World War, Kaiser Wilhelm is reputed to have wished he had read this book decades earlier. Its wisdom is as universal and timeless as Chinese jade. It inspired the coalition generals who brilliantly outflanked the Iraqi forces in the 1991 Desert Storm campaign. It is also well suited for the conduct of terrorism, which is an asymmetric form of warfare, with the lesser protagonist exploiting weaknesses of its more powerful adversary.

The al-Qaeda training manuals document in chilling language ‘The Art of Terror’. The attack on 9/11 had the hallmark of a judo throw by a black-belt martial artist: it caused US strength to become weakness – likened by al-Qaeda to having one’s own finger forcibly poked into one’s own eye. Religiously motivated, the strategy of al-Qaeda displays intelligence and rationality in abundance, the two premises on which the mathematical theory of conflict is founded. Known as game theory, in reference to the earliest prototype models, this quantitative branch of the social sciences has been publicized in the Oscar winning film, ‘A Beautiful Mind’. The father of game theory was the prolific mathematical genius John von Neumann, whom the RAND corporation hired for the ideas that came to him whilst shaving in the morning. Whereas his elegant equations, and those from the beautiful mind of Nobel laureate John Nash, allow a succinct expression of the fundamental concepts of game theory, it is possible to express them in ordinary linguistic terms. Indeed, some extracts from ‘The Art of War’, such as the opening quote above, are ancient paraphrases of modern game theory.

Rather than striving just to attack one narrow group of targets, which are then likely to be well defended, a randomized mixed strategy is best where an attack is focused on a diversified range of targets. According to game theory, the incorporation of a purely chance component into operational decision-making is a virtue: randomizing the choice between alternative strategies helps throw your opponent off balance. If Osama bin Laden tossed a dime in a cave to decide which of two US cities to target, no amount of satellite intelligence would clarify the choice. The larger the random component the more stretched the security forces would be, and the greater the al-Qaeda belief that the outcome was the irrevocable will of Allah.

In fact, it is known that there are significant random, partly serendipitous, elements in al-Qaeda attack selection. For example, there is randomness in the way in which targets come to the attention of terrorists; there is randomness in the order in which they put targets under surveillance; and there is randomness in the emergence of individual terrorists from different countries to form an attack cluster. Intelligence from al-Qaeda captives confirms the broadening of the target range to include potential strikes on shopping malls and apartments, as well as the prime centers of political and economic power.

‘Avoid strength, and attack weakness’, is another of Sun Tzu’s precepts which governs the conduct of a terrorist campaign. For al-Qaeda, this may be expressed in the succinct language of physical science as: follow the path of least resistance. In hydrology, the principle of minimum energy expenditure governs the pattern of river drainage networks. In a similar way to the flow of water, the flow of al-Qaeda terrorism activity is towards weapon modes and targets, against which the technical, logistical and security barriers to mission success are least. Ready-to-use weapons, such as hijacked transportation or surface-to-air missiles, are therefore attractive for their robustness and reliability, and for their past record of successful terrorist usage; al-Qaeda team players are fast learners.

In Pentagon war games, the concept has emerged of a Redline: a level of attack on the USA which is severe, but which falls short of triggering a determined US response to achieve a total victory, as happened at Pearl Harbor. Wherever the Redline might be drawn, the al-Qaeda kamikaze pilots deliberately flew their hijacked planes well passed it. The al-Qaeda war game is like no other. Omar Saeed Sheikh, the convicted killer of the Wall Street Journalist Daniel Pearl, was a London school chess champion, and a student of mathematics at the London School of Economics, before he switched from economic to war games. A mathematician might play a war game like chess: cold-blooded enough to dispose mercilessly of opponents; and hard-headed enough to sacrifice one’s own forces if this was the optimal move. Precisely three days before the attacks on 9/11, the leader of the Afghan opposition to the Taliban regime was assassinated whilst being interviewed by two North Africans. This was no ordinary assassination: when their booby-trapped camera exploded, these two killers died with their victim. Thinking well ahead in the game, al-Qaeda preferred its members to chat up the beauties of Paradise than chat to security services in captivity. Those who are skeptical that terrorism risk can be understood and modeled underestimate the intelligence and rationality of al-Qaeda.