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Two internationally recognized experts use newly available documents from al-Qaeda and ISIS to explain how jihadist groups think, grow, and adapt. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Thomas Joscelyn recast militant groups as learning organizations, detailing their embrace of strategic, tactical, and technological innovation.
List of contents
1. The Fire Next Time
2. Learning to Win
3. The Far-Enemy Strategy
4. The Unfriendly Skies: Plots Against Aviation
5. The Early Adopter: Anwar al-Awlaki in the Digital Space
6. Strategic Learning: Al-Qaeda and Jihadism in the Arab Spring
7. The Islamic State’s Rise and Rule
8. The Fitna: ISIS Versus al-Qaeda
9. How al-Qaeda Survived the War in Afghanistan
10. ISIS’s External Operations: A Study in Innovation
11. The Past and Future of Jihadist Organizational Learning
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Notes
Index
Summary
Although the United States has prioritized its fight against militant groups for two decades, the transnational jihadist movement has proved surprisingly resilient and adaptable. Many analysts and practitioners have underestimated these militant organizations, viewing them as unsophisticated or unchanging despite the ongoing evolution of their tactics and strategies.
In Enemies Near and Far, two internationally recognized experts use newly available documents from al-Qaeda and ISIS to explain how jihadist groups think, grow, and adapt. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Thomas Joscelyn recast militant groups as learning organizations, detailing their embrace of strategic, tactical, and technological innovation. Drawing on theories of organizational learning, they provide a sweeping account of these groups’ experimentation over time. Gartenstein-Ross and Joscelyn shed light on militant groups’ most effective strategic and tactical moves, including attacks targeting aircraft and the use of the internet to inspire and direct lone attackers, and they examine jihadists’ ability to shift their strategy based on political context. While militant groups’ initial efforts to upgrade their capabilities often fail, these attempts should generally be understood not as failures but as experiments in service of a learning process—a process that continues until these groups achieve a breakthrough.
Providing unprecedented historical and strategic perspective on how jihadist groups learn and evolve, Enemies Near and Far also explores how to anticipate future threats, analyzing how militants are likely to deploy a range of emerging technologies.
Additional text
Enemies Near and Far is an impressively comprehensive overview of terrorism around the world in the modern era. Gartenstein-Ross and Joscelyn’s excellent theoretical framework provides compelling insights to which every policymaker should pay close attention.
