” State-sponsored Terrorism” is of course, network warfare. During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union sponsored state actor and subnational proxies in order to wage geopolitical competition with a circuit-breaker of plausible deniability that prevented direct superpower confrontation and escalation to nuclear war. Proxies were kept on relatively short leashes, whenever possible. The Reagan administration, hardly a group that was soft on Communism, agonized and delayed providing the Afghan Mujahedin stinger missiles precisely because those proxies were seen ( correctly ) even within sections of the CIA as unreliable and uncontrollable, compared to, say, the Contras.

The Soviets were less discriminating with their aid but when a proxy wandered away from Moscow’s playbook, as with Gaddafi’s bombing in West Germany that provoked the Reagan administration to attempt to kill the Libyan strongman in a military attack, the Soviets cooly let their proxy take their lumps. This contrasts with their attitude toward more loyal proxies like Hafez Assad, whom the Soviets backed to the extent of replacing much of the Syrian air force shot down over Lebanon by the Israelis.

Networks have the capacity to become self-sustaining enterprises. When Superpower aid dried up across the board in the early 1990’s – terrorists, guerillas and rogue state actors turned to various black market enterprises and Transnational Organized Crime networks to move drugs, diamonds, arms, WMD technology, slave labor and other forms of contraband to create revenue streams. Taking a page from the old 1930’s Comintern, these networks formed legal front organizations, charitiable foundations and even business enterprises in the Core and Seam states to raise additional revenue streams and launder illicit income. By the mid 1990’s, Cold War proxies were morphing into “ Non-state Actors” that were independent players on national, regional or global scales.

This is the strategic environment of the GWOT. Not a world of nation-states but a network of networks in which nation-states are merely one of the major hubs.

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