this was a simple question, nearly fifteen years into the wars it was still hard to

this was a simple question, nearly fifteen years into the wars it was still hard to answer. There were a lot of dead terrorists. There were also a lot of new ones. As the war against terrorism had progressed in the years since 2001, it had produced at least this: a huge amount of data. Inside the Pentagon, analysis teams poured over records of phone calls and text messages. They examined maps of personal relations, and studied granular statistics about who had been killed and why and when. All of this information went into targeting computers and databases, and what became more and more apparent with each passing year was that the spread of terrorism after 9/11 looked like nothing so much as the spread of a disease. This was, at first, no great insight. After all, revolutionary ideas, dangerous ideologies or just plain panic often look like epidemics. But what was shocking as you studied the Pentagon numbers was the speed of this infection. Disease epidemics, even the most virulently aggressive ones like Ebola or drug-resistant tuberculosis, move at the pace of human contact; they can be watched and blocked and even quarantined. But the contagions associated with terrorism were warp- driven to a pace well beyond what the soldiers and analysts could match or even fully monitor. “Is our current situation such that ‘the harder we work, the behinder we get?” Rumsfeld asked in 2003.38 To be constantly behind. This was a commander’s nightmare. Among other things it was that sense of never quite catching up that had so seared the new generals in the audience of my speeches. But it seemed to be an inescapable reality. One day a guy in Baghdad would figure out how to make an Explosively Formed Penetrator (EFP) - a sort of pipe bomb that becomes a flying chunk of red-hot steel and can smash through a tank from 100 yards away - and ten days later the same design of projectile would take out an official thousands of miles away in rural Afghanistan, before US troops had had a chance to update their defenses.*? Behinder. An American commander would arrive in a new town in Iraq, receive a briefing about who he could really trust, and discover a week later half of them were showing up on terrorist call logs. Behinder. The Americans knew why this was happening. The data made that clear enough. The proliferation of roadside IEDs, for instance: Obviously there was Al-Qaeda Institute of Technology, no central IED academy where bomb makers could gather to safely study trigger design or leisurely swap placement ideas.*° Such a place would have been flattened by a Tomahawk or a drone within hours of its discovery. And though tomes like Tarek Mahmoud el-Sawah’s famous 400-page guide to bomb making were often picked up on raids, they were out of date. (El-Sawah’s tips included 38 “Is our current situation”: Rumsfeld 2003 memorandum as above 39 One day a guy: Anne Stenersen, “’Bomb-making for Beginners’: Inside an Al- Qaeda E-Learning Course”, Perspectives on Terrorism, Vol 7. No. 1 (2013) 40 Obviously there was no Al-Qaeda Institute of Technology: Matthew Bolton, “From minefields to minespace: An archeology of the changing architecture of autonomous killing in US Army field manuals on landmines, booby traps and IEDs” Political Geography 46 (2015) p. 47 37 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018269