To try and illuminate my point I want to start of with two scenarios:

A person walks up to you and smacks you in the head with a baseball bat, you in turn do likewise, this is the theory of Mutual Assured Destruction

Well lets say this time someone else nails you in the head ... but you don't know who? The problem with most terrorist acts is people usually don't jump up and say "hey I'm the guy that sucker punched ya! ", they usually try to get away with it, without retaliation, so to get to the point.....




In another thread I brought up the idea that certain countries can have WMD because they know if they misuse them they will be retaliated against with equal force. I pointed out that this dosent work for terrorist or countries that support terrorism, the point of this post is:


1. How can you apply MAD to a terrorist group, that unlike a country that formally declares war, can quitly slip into the background?

2.If MAD dosen't or dose apply, how do you deal with the threat of the terrorist or the country that supplies the terrorist. (ie send troops into said country?)


p.s (For those of you who think my scenerio didn't make since just read The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy)

Correction: Hezbollah and Hamas almost always claim responsibility for attacks against Isreal. So I'm not sure why you think:



MAD doesn't work when your dealing with Martyrs (suicide bombers) and most others

--cheers

MAD is a conventional warfare theory. meaning not that it is a typical military scenario but it is a policy of direct threat by two powers vying for the capital advantage of a battlefield. (Tanks, airplanes, aircraft carriers, or in this case nuclear missiles.)

We want everyone to come at us in uniform and by the rules of open warfare because we know we can beat any other country one on one in this situation. Guerilla warfare and terrorism (sometimes legitimately named, sometimes not so legitimately named) are tactics that use violence against foes with superior firepower.

MAD does not apply. There is no way to beat terrorism, but there are ways not to lose to it. Most importantly it is best not to give countries or groups justifiable reasons for using these tactics against us. I think this is the problems that Israel fell into. (Note: I do not condone targeting civilians for political or military purposes.) We fell into that trap in Vietnam.

Terrorism is not a monolithic force. It is also important to have good information. Al-Qaeda has its own agenda while Hamas has another. Patron states and destabilized regions are also a key part of the problem. We were never going to win a war in Vietnam while we allowed the government in North Vietnam to get support to the Viet Cong and send troops down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. (Even if we did knock out the Hanoi government there, we would have had to deal with a long term insurrection against a colonial occupation.

I never said that terrorist never acknowledge an attack that they carried out, however some don't and it only takes one misunderstanding to lead to a disaster. I through in my reference to The Sum of All fears because that was a pretty good example of the point I was trying to make.

Basically a terrorist group detonates a nuclear weapon in a US football field, right from the start each country is blaming each other for the attacks and the US and Russia almost start a nuclear war. You may be correct in the fact that the Hezbollah and Hamas do take credit for the actions but in an age of NBC(weapons not the news station)how many terrorist groups does it take?