War on Terrorism

Modern acts of terrorism have changed warfare in a plenitude of ways. Terrorism, as the name implies, are aggressive acts carried out by terrorist groups to instill fear and terror into its enemies. Terrorism is a form of unconventional warfare, thus using conventional methods of warfare (such as sending out a massive army to find and fight terrorists) to counteract it may be ineffective. When we talk about modern day terrorism, Al-Qaeda and its suicide bombings inevitably comes to our minds. Unfortunately, terrorism affects innocent civilians more so than soldiers. After watching Zero Dark Thirty, I was quite astonished about the ingenious methods that the Al-Qaeda employs to make its operations covert. It’s very surprising that in this day and age, its high ranking leaders uses couriers rather than any forms of technological communication to communicate with one another. This complicates the CIA’s job because their methods of communication leaves little to no traces of online activity to be tracked, and was frankly one of the many reasons why it took many years to bring Osama bin Laden to justice. For this reason, the CIA must use other tactics to bring down terrorist groups, such as the use of torture / interrogation, moles, or bribes to infiltrate the terrorist organization. For example, early in the movie we see the CIA’s extensive use of torture and interrogation to make the detainees disclose information. Although it is unfortunate to see torture in any way, shape, or form, it’s one of the only ways to coerce the enemy to spill their knowledge. But sometimes torture is fruitless, as we have seen in the movie when the detainees are extremely devoted to their cause and refuse to give out data or instead fabricate information. Finally, terrorism has made many countries, such as America, lean towards the defensive side of war. This is why America has been ever more so relying on drones rather than soldiers to directly take out terrorist organizations.