What is New about the New Terrorism and How Dangerous is It?

it is changing, that it has become ‘the new terrorism’. 1 This terrorism is reputedly distinguished from the old by a new structure, a new kind of personnel, and a new attitude toward violence. The new structure is a network, facilitated by information technology, the new personnel are amateurs, who often come together in ad hoc or transitory groupings, and the new attitude an increased willingness to cause mass casualties, perhaps by using chemical, biological, nuclear or radiological (CBNR) weapons. Taken together, network organization and amateur participation suggest that the ‘new terrorists’ no longer need state sponsorship as much as their predecessors did. The impression left by accounts of the new terrorism is that it is more dangerous or at least more difficult to counter than its predecessor. Now that this view has been well developed and ably presented, it is time to assess it. Ultimately, we must ask whether what we see in terrorism today is really new and in what ways and if it poses more of a threat than the old terrorism. On balance, we will conclude that there is little that is new in the new terrorism and what is new is not necessarily more dangerous or difficult to counter than the old. The New Terrorism A good place to begin an analysis of the new terrorism is its networked structure. Terrorists are now able and willing to develop network forms of organization for the same reason that businesses are. The information revolution, by lowering the cost of communication, allows organizations to push functions outside a controlling hierarchical structure. Organizations can thus flatten out their pyramids of authority and control and approach a network form, a group of more or less autonomous, dispersed entities, linked by advanced communications and perhaps nothing more than a common purpose. Motivating or compelling the move from hierarchy to network are the advantages that an organization acquires as it transforms itself. It becomes more flexible, adaptive and resilient because each of its units senses and reacts on its own in loose coordination with the others. This multiplies the opportunities for the organization to learn, making it more flexible and adaptive. The organization becomes more resilient because if one or even several of its constituent entities are destroyed, the others carry on. A network, unlike a hierarchy, cannot be destroyed by decapitation. In the case of terrorists, the loosely linked autonomous entities that make up a network might be individuals, such as Ramzi Yousef, who organized the World Trade Center bombing, or cells such as those involved in the leaderless resistance of the