The Banality of Islamic State

The Banality of Islamic State

http://www.businessweek.com/interactive/2014-the-business-of-isis-spreadsheets-annual-reports-and-terror/#/

How ISIS Corporatized Terror

By Cam Simpson

November 20, 2014

 

 

 Islamic State introduced itself to most Americans this summer through two infamous beheading videos. They were professionally produced films, released by what U.S. ­intelligence officials would later call the most sophisticated terrorist propaganda machine they’ve seen. (On Nov. 16, Islamic State said it had ­beheaded an American Muslim convert and aid worker, Peter “Abdul-Rahman” Kassig.) But as the group has continued to make gains despite international air attacks in the wake of the ­beheadings, it’s become clear that its sophistication reaches well beyond video production and messaging. It’s evident in military operations, such as Islamic State’s recent quick conquest of the ancient Iraqi city of Hit in Anbar province through a precision use of suicide car bombers, and in its ability to replicate the operations across the region.

The group’s leaders portray themselves as akin to seventh century warriors thundering forth on horseback to expand their religious empire by sword. They call their car bombs “steeds” and their drivers the “death admirers, the knights of martyrdom.” But in many important ways they have much less in common with ­medieval warriors than they do with modern ­bureaucrats, and a successful attempt to defeat them may require understanding their logistics, their financing, and their management structure as much as their extreme theology.

It may sound bizarre for a group calling itself a caliphate, but the foundation of its management model, as identified by experts, is more akin to that of General Motors than it is to a ­religious dynasty from the Dark Ages. After decades, we may have arrived at the ultimate professionalization of terror.

During a routine January 2007 patrol in Anbar province, in a town along the Euphrates called Tuzliyah al Gharbiyah, a unit of U.S. Marines stumbled on a cache of nine documents in a roadside ditch. They included financial records, payrolls, supply purchase records, administrative records, and other details of fund flows into and out of a single local cell in Anbar of a group then calling itself the “Islamic State of Iraq.” Not long after, Iraqi militiamen working with the U.S. stormed a home in a town farther down the Euphrates. They found a computer hard drive holding ledgers with 1,200 files detailing the finances and operations of provincial-level managers overseeing the cell and others like it across Anbar province.

Photograph by Reuters

Militants parade their vehicles on the streets of northern Raqqa province on June 30 to celebrate their declaration of an Islamic “caliphate”

Taken together, the Anbar records allowed for a forensic ­reconstruction of the back-office operations of a terrorist ­insurgency from its local level up to its divisional headquarters. The data were handed over to the National Defense ­Research ­Institute of Rand Corp., a U.S. ­Department of Defense-funded think tank based in Santa Monica, Calif. Seven researchers set out to ­determine what the ledgers, receipts, memos, and other records meant. What they concluded in a 2010 report, written for then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates, should be ­familiar to students of business management: The group was ­decentralized, organized, and run on what’s called the “multidivisional-­hierarchy form” of management, or M-form for short.

CLICK TO READ THE REST